But the next morning, when Irene went out for groceries, she stopped at a newsstand and bought a newspaper. The man gave her change and peered at her. “Say,” he said, “ain’t you that lady pilot?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You are! Irene Foster. Son of a gun, my old lady’s never gonna believe this!”

Irene put the change in her pocket and folded the newspaper under her arm. “People mistake me for her all the time, I’m afraid.”

When she returned to the cottage, she put away the groceries and opened the newspaper and started reading about the war in Spain.

From the perspective of history, it’s easy to see the outcome of the Spanish Civil War as inevitable, and maybe it was. But in the early fall of 1936 the Nationalist coup had only just started to gather steam, and the bombings of Madrid and Guernica still lay in the future as horrors yet undreamed of. You could say to yourself that while Hitler and Mussolini might be supplying Franco, Stalin had thrown the resources of the Soviet Union behind the leftist Republic, and how in the hell did you choose between thugs like those? Even in 1936, before history had revealed them for the monsters they were, had revealed the Holocaust and also the Ukraine famine, nobody could reasonably pretend that either fascism or communism was a nice benevolent system of government. Why did it have to be one or the other?

Still, while the great nations of the world remained officially neutral, plenty of Westerners had decided which side they were on and took action, and most of them sided with the loyalist Republicans. They represented, after all, the lawfully elected government, however leftist, whereas the Nationalists stank of ruthlessness and repression. It’s not entirely clear what political views Sam Mallory held—he never expressed them publicly, and few private documents remain—or how he first came into contact with the various American brigades giving succor to the Spanish Republicans. What we do know is that this turning point in Spain’s history happened to coincide with a turning point in Sam Mallory’s life, and possibly the political question was irrelevant anyway. He was a man searching for purpose, and in the death and horror of a brutal war, he thought he had found it.

Irene wasn’t so sure.

“They’re bombing everywhere,” she said. “They’re assaulting Madrid right now. Hitler’s sending his own air force.”

“I already told you all this. Civil wars are brutal. It’s personal, it’s not just some fellow you might be friends with if some archduke wasn’t assassinated. Everyone’s got a grudge. Against the Church, against the Reds, against the rich, you name it. They’re killing children over there.”

“It’s terrible. But it’s not our fight. When did Spain ever send help to you, when you were fighting Germany?”