The Bell Curve:

I watched the first episode of “The Pacific” on Sunday, and I will watch the other nine episodes in the weeks ahead. It promises to be “Band of Brothers” played out on the other side of the world, on some Pacific islands that I knew firsthand from flying out wounded warriors.

Beyond that brief familiarity and the graphic combat scenes, “The Pacific” has already discovered a by-product of war that both precedes and lingers long after a war becomes history: the powerful bonding that takes place between men — and increasingly women, as well — who share the war experience. This bonding lasts a lifetime and transcends the connective power of fraternity brothers or neighbors or working partners or even love affairs. Here are some examples from an old bondsman.

When I enrolled at the University of Missouri out of high school in Fort Wayne, Ind., we were not yet at war, and I didn’t have enough money to pay my out-of-state tuition. But there turned out to be help close by. I had an uncle who ran a Savings and Loan in Jefferson City, and he told me to use his address. So I did and sailed through enrollment — except for one mindless mistake. I used my Indiana address on a single critical document and got hit with the out-of-state fee. I turned back to my uncle for help, and he told me to wait 24 hours and then check at the enrollment window.

When I did that the next day, the clerk on duty peered intensely through the grille, then disappeared, followed immediately by a man who I assumed was the registrar, who also studied me.

Then he said, “You’ve got some powerful friends,” and shoved a telegram under the grille.

Like an idiot I gave the telegram back to the Registrar, and I can’t remember the exact wording, but it went something like this: “I would be most grateful for any courtesies you can show Mr. Bell, a good Missouri boy we’ve known for many years, who made a careless mistake on his application. ”

It was signed “Sen. Harry S Truman.”

When I completed a new enrollment form with my Missouri address the next day, I was officially a student. And only when I thanked my uncle did I learn that he had served in the same platoon with Truman in France during World War I. Politically, my uncle was a rabid Republican who probably never voted for Truman, but when he needed help, bonding trumped mistakes and rules.

Bad precedent? Of course. But that was in the depth of the Depression, and I had no difficulty accepting my good fortune. Truman played a similar role in my life five years later. He was president of the United States then, the war was over and I was back in school with a wife and child, when it was announced that Winston Churchill would be making a speech at a tiny college near Jefferson City. My uncle swung into action again and got me appointed to the honor guard at the railroad station. So I got to shake hands with Churchill and hear the famous “iron curtain” speech. Bonding scored again.

One other example of how bonding can work. In the 1960s, I was assigned by a national newspaper supplement to do a profile of the FBI, ending with an interview of J. Edgar Hoover. I spent a week in Washington piling up research, got a handshake instead of an interview with the director and was headed to the airport when the agent who had been squiring me around said he had been instructed to make sure I understood that the director would review the story before it was published. I said that was not the rules I played by, and if this had been a pre-condition, I wouldn’t have wasted their time and mine. He said the director would not be pleased with my answer, and I got on the plane home. I went into Chicago the following Monday on other business. I called home at noon to be told by my wife that a black sedan holding two men in suits had been parked in front of our house all morning. I told her to ask the occupants if she could be of help, and she declined. So I stormed over to the FBI office because one of my close wartime pilot friends was an agent stationed there. Fortunately he was in and calmed me down.

He told me to wait and came back in a few minutes to say the agents were there because I had taken some photographs that were restricted. I told him this was baloney and the only pictures I had taken were passed out freely every day to visitors, and were given to me without restriction, so to please get the agents away from the front of my house. He disappeared again, came back quickly to say they were gone, and how about lunch. The end of this story, as I recall it, is that the same heat was put on the publication and the editors refused to run the story under those conditions.

There have been plenty of similar examples of military bonding in my experience in the six decades since World War II ended — especially in the talk during monthly lunches over many of those years with four other former Navy pilots. All this took place in a group of three Republicans and two Democrats remembering how it was, along with God knows what other kinds of mix on the current issues of the day. Our five is down to two, which is surely also happening to the men we see portrayed in “The Pacific.” Meanwhile, we, the survivors, may be fast disappearing, but we’re still bonding.

JOSEPH N. BELL lives in Newport Beach. His column runs Thursdays.