What chance does the son of Greek immigrants in St. Louis have at the end of a Depression and at the beginning of a war? Thrown into World War II with a high school education and not much life experience Michel Poulos is among the troops that go ashore at Utah Beach and fight their way across France to Germany. En route Michal is awakened to life, love, and the realities of war, and he emerges after two years in Europe with an awakened awareness of the economic realities of life in the Twentieth Century.

Poulos can sink or swim. He is carried along by a tide like the world has never seen before. Six million service men and women left our shores to fight in the European and Pacific Theatres. Many had never been one hundred miles from home, but they returned determined to change the world. Michael Poulos was swept along with their enthusiasm, hunger and ingenuity into a developing economy, inquisitive scientific quest, and a thirst to do more, make more, improve on old ways and question the status quo. He elected not to be a bystander, but rather, to jump headlong into manufacturing, and success was soon to follow.

What Poulos learned in his two years in Europe during World War II marked him for life. There were good and bad lessons, some of which he couldn’t help; some he could not forget, but all were a part of the teaching moment of a man who started with little but who proved to be a fast study to the lessons of war.

The lessons were not all economic. Some were about love and relationships. The loss of a wife from the ravages of cancer; the love of his sons, and a haunting fling with a French girl in 1944 all propel him toward the century’s end sometimes excited, sometimes depressed, but always intrigued with the situation with which .he finds himself.

As readers we are swept along from the loft of a French barn to the canyons of Wall Street, and from the life of a grease monkey living under an army truck in a muddy field in Normandie to the touchdown of his private jet at Paris’ Orly Field, Michael Poulos was a poster child for America’s Greatest Generation.