In his introduction to "The War: An Intimate History," Ken Burns states that his documentary is about those "who did the actual dying and fighting" in World War II and those who waited for their return.

I was born in Pittsburgh in April 1939, less than five months before Hitler's armies invaded Poland. I entered the first grade at Humboldt elementary on the working-class South Side in September 1945, a month after the war was over.

Those of us who went marching off to Humboldt in 1945 were too young to understand the emotional impact of World War II. In my own family, I had relatives who fought in the Philippines, hunted submarines in the Atlantic and witnessed the A-bomb tests at Bikini Atoll, but they were reluctant to talk about their experiences in the war and just seemed relieved to be home. The experience of World War II was over for the Greatest Generation, but for my generation the culture of war would give shape and substance to the best years of our lives.

Walking down Carson Street, we could go into Breitweiser's or Ross's confectionery and thumb through the adventures in Marvel and DC Comics of super-heroes, like Captain America, who had single-handedly won the war. We could stroll into Chester's and buy the records of a youthful Doris Day singing about a sentimental journey home and an older Bing Crosby, with the help of Les Paul's haunting guitar, crooning that it's been a long, long time. And there were all those toy soldiers, tanks and planes waiting for us at Autenreith's Dollar Store, and Woolworth's five-and-ten.

We had a cornucopia of sights and sounds to fire our imagination about World War II, but nothing was better at turning us into war lovers than those Hollywood B-movies, stuffed with patriotism and propaganda, that were still appearing regularly at the Colonial and the Rex theaters. We watched brave Americans fight on remote islands to the bitter end, and then, like General MacArthur, return to finish off the enemy once and for all. We also knew we had nothing to worry about as long as John Wayne was there to pilot a Flying Tiger, captain a PT boat, inspire the Seabees or lead us back to Bataan.

I was so gullible and taken by war movies that, after watching "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo," I believed Van Johnson when he told his screen wife not to be upset about the leg he lost in the Doolittle raid because he'd just grow it back. He may have been kidding, but I took great comfort in knowing if I lost my arm or leg shooting down Tokyo Joe, the villain of my favorite war movie, "God Is My Co-Pilot," that, lizard-like, I'd grow it back.

I spent my five years at Humboldt playing war at recess, drawing pictures of P-40 Flying Tigers and P-51 Mustangs and day-dreaming about becoming a fighter pilot, winning a war that had already been won. But all that changed by the time I went marching off to South High in 1950.

In the summer of 1950, the North Koreans gave my generation a real shooting war by invading the South. Every day I studied the maps in Pittsburgh newspapers in a state of disbelief while our troops retreated from Taejon to Pusan. By September, however, General MacArthur had restored my faith in war by ordering a surprise amphibious assault on Inchon harbor near Seoul that began a rout of enemy forces and drove them back deep into North Korea, all the way to the Yalu River and to the edge of what seemed a certain victory.

By 1950, I'd also been reading in my Weekly Reader that, despite our victory in World War II, the world beyond the South Side had remained a dangerous place, darkened by mushroom clouds, divided by an Iron Curtain and infiltrated by Russian spies. The 1950 South High yearbook was another reminder that the world was becoming more threatening and sinister. While the cover had the symbol of the atom embossed on it, the end page had a drawing of a high school senior gazing up at a rocket headed for destination unknown, though in 1950 it could have been on its way to Moscow or the moon.

A year later, Pittsburgh's South Side experienced its own close encounter with Cold War propaganda and paranoia when "I Was a Communist for the FBI" appeared at the Arcade Theatre. Loosely based on the espionage in Pittsburgh of Matt Cvetic, the movie was about a steelworker who poses as a Communist sympathizer to help the FBI penetrate a Red-tainted union. There was even a teacher in the movie who gets into trouble because she fails to see the dangers of Communism to the American way of life.

The Cold War had shaken my faith in the glory of war and undermined my nostalgia for those on the home front, but it would take a television documentary for me to finally see the human face of war.

When the Emmy award-winning "Victory at Sea" aired on NBC in the 1952-53 television season, it had the spectacular battle scenes and lush music that had seduced me into romancing the war, but it also had heart-breaking scenes, like those of terrified children huddled in bomb shelters during the London blitz. When I saw those stricken faces, I recognized for the first time the horror of war for those who struggled to live through it. After that, war never seemed the same.

It was also my first encounter with what Ken Burns describes in his introduction to "The War: An Intimate History" as the most important lesson that he learned from his documentary, a lesson as relevant today as it was in World War II: "No nation should embark upon any war without first understanding what its cost will be and without being certain that its objectives are really worth the fearful price."