"I grew up in a family of fliers," comments Pete Shipman, who would serve in the Army Air Forces and travel the world after the war in the oil business. Born in Jackson, Mississippi, Pete was commissioned in ROTC at the University of Mississippi in 1941. He shipped overseas to New Hebrides with an African-American infantry unit, a battalion in the Twenty-Fourth Infantry Division. The men, he recalls, had never fired live ammunition. He returned to the states for flight instruction in B-17 bombers, and spent the rest of the war attending one school after another. In General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth, studies involved planning an invasion of Japan. "It kind of shook everybody up when they came out with an estimate of casualties," he recalls. After the war he worked in management and consulting positions with several oil companies in the United States and abroad.