George Bush was a child of privilege when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. His father had accumulated a fortune on Wall street and was a member of the U.S. Senate. His mother presided over a large home in Greenwich, Connecticut; she sent her children off to the best private schools and camps in chauffeured limousines, but when they returned home she preached modesty and public responsibility.

So it was only natural that, on the day he turned eighteen, George Bush volunteered for the Navy. He didn't wait for his draft number to be called. His father, the powerful senator Prescott Bush, didn't attempt to arrange a safe job for his son in the War Department. George volunteered for a relatively new branch of the service, the Navy Air Corps. He wanted to be a combat pilot.

By now, after all his years in public life, his combat experience is well known. There's even a home movie of him being fished from the sea after his plan was shot down during a bombing run on a Japanese target.

For a man who spent so much of his life in the public arena, President Bush was curiously inarticulate about those defining moments. He was battle-scarred in a way that the man he served as vice president, Ronald Reagan, was not; but next to Reagan, Bush always looked a little like the younger kid, wide-eyed with hero worship.

Even when invited to expand on his thoughts about how World War II shaped him, President Bush is a reluctant witness. Yes, of course, he considers his years as a Navy combat flier an important experience. He often thinks about the day he was shot down, but when he does, he's more likely to think about his two buddies who were killed. Could he have done more to save them?

As a young man at the controls of a TBD Avenger, flying off carrier decks, dropping torpedoes on enemy targets, and getting back safely, Bush was a long way from those days of privilege in Greenwich.

As a former congressman, ambassador to the United Nations, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, vice president and then president of the United States, George Bush represents an unequaled record of public service within his generation.

For his service in World War II, George Bush insists he is owed nothing. In fact, he believes that World War II was such an overwhelming threat that those who served did so out of an obligation that should not require special treatment forevermore. As he says, "Serving in World War II, I was a tiny part of something noble."

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Random House who gave permission to print this excerpt publishes the Greatest Generation, available at book stores.