Philadelphia, PA - Looks like Red Tails, George Lucas' World War II biopic about the Tuskegee Airmen, made $19 million over the weekend. Decent, considering its limited opening in the dreaded dead zone between Christmas and the Oscars.

I wasn't going to let ho-hum reviews stop me from seeing it. If anything, I went to honor men like Maj. John L. Harrison, one of the 320 surviving airmen (out of about 900) to receive a Congressional Gold Medal in 2007.

Harrison saw it, too, and liked it.

"I thought it was a superior depiction of aerial combat. It was truthful," says the retired Air Force command pilot, one in a class of 41 airmen who received flight training in Tuskegee, Ala., in 1943.

Harrison has flown more than 12 types of aircraft and logged more than 10,000 hours all over the world, but he never got to fly World War II missions. See, the military believed black pilots could never be trained enough, so Harrison spent the entire war stateside.

"We trained for four years at bases all over the country," he says. "We were the best-trained outfit in the United States."

For the most part, Harrison tried to ignore the racial prejudice that defined his stint in the military, starting in an Omaha recruiting office in 1941, when a white sergeant threw his enlistment papers back at him and said, "We don't train you people.

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