March 3, 1985 – Muncie, Indiana

"Grandpa, who's this?" Alex Carter's sticky fingers flipped open the battered photo album he had unearthed from one of the boxes in the dusty attic.

"Who's what?" Carter asked, turning to face his young grandson. "Hey! Where'd you find that?"

"It was here, in one of these boxes." The boy's face fell. "I'm sorry, Grandpa, I didn't mean to hurt anything. It was just sitting there and I wondered what was inside. I'll put it back." He hastily slammed the book shut and shoved it back in the box.

"No, it's just that I lost that album years ago and haven't been able to find it. Come and look at it with me," Carter said, picking the book out of the box and gesturing over to the window.

"Won't Grandma be mad?"

"You let me worry about your grandmother. Plus, I think we deserve a break." Lifting a pile of ancient magazines from a moth-eaten armchair, Carter pulled the boy onto his lap. His fingers played gently around the edges of the worn leather binding. The inscription on the front had faded and rubbed off in places. "This used to say something: 'Heroes aren't born; heroes are made.' Do you know what that means?"

Alex shook his head no, seriously. Carter brushed the boy's thick hair gently away from his face. "Real heroes aren't just born and suddenly they're heroes. They're ordinary people who do great things. I used to know a bunch of them."

Flipping open the first page, a group picture of all of Hogan's Heroes stared back at him. They were positioned in front of their barracks back at Stalag 13. The Germans had shot it as a propaganda picture, but Colonel Hogan had managed to get a copy for each of them after the war. "They don't look like heroes," Alex remarked suddenly. "They just look like ordinary people."

"And that's all we were." Reaching out a finger, Carter tapped Hogan's figure. "That's Colonel Hogan, he was in charge. He could get out of any jam we happened to get ourselves in. This one time, he managed to get us all out of camp and into town. Then, at a party filled with Germans, we robbed a safe. And he got all of us through the war safely."

"You were a prisoner, right?" Alex asked, confused.

"We were all prisoners. But we were special prisoners. Only the Germans didn't know that. They didn't know that Corporal Newkirk could get into the kommandant's safe better than the kommandant. And they didn't know that Sergeant Kinchloe was in almost constant communication with Allied headquarters in London. And they didn't know that Corporal LeBeau served them dog food on silver platters. And they didn't know that the only reason there were never any escapes from our camp was because Colonel Hogan didn't let anyone escape. And they didn't know that I had one of the best chemistry labs in the area set up and working beneath their feet." As he mentioned each name, he moved his finger over them in the picture.

The picture had been hastily arranged. LeBeau had emerged from the barracks still with his white apron and chef's hat on, a spoon still in his hand. Newkirk had just finished stealing Schultz's keys, and if you knew where to look, you could see the bulge in his pocket. Kinch's finger was still marking his place in the book he had been reading. Colonel Hogan's hat was at a jaunty angle and you would never know that he had spent the better part of the night blowing up an ammo dump. Carter himself had been called up from his lab and traces of soot from his last failed experiment still marked his face.

"How come they didn't know?"

Carter shrugged. He really didn't know why Schultz and Klink had stayed in the dark for so long. "I don't know. Sometimes our guards helped us, even if they didn't know it." The bottom picture on the page was of Schultz and Klink and he pointed it out to his grandson. "These were two of our guards. Sergeant Schultz, and Colonel Klink. Schultz always said that he never knew anything but, in war, he didn't like to take sides. Mainly, he just wanted to stay alive to get back to his own family. And Colonel Klink was so worried about his reputation and keeping everything in order, that if Colonel Hogan could provide an explanation for something, Colonel Klink really didn't care if it was the truth, so long as no one escaped and it kept the Gestapo off his back."

He had often wondered how much of their operation Schultz and Klink had really known, but had never asked. After the war, they had stayed in touch through letters for the first few years, but then as they had got back to their own lives and moved forward, the letters had become fewer and farther between. Even the core group had lost touch after a dozen years.

LeBeau had gone back to Paris and rebuilt their family café. Colonel Hogan had stayed in the military and was a major general the last the Carter had heard. Kinch had gone back to school and finally managed to get the degree he had wanted so much. Then he had gone into radio where the colour of his skin meant nothing. Newkirk had opened his own pub, declaring there was no sense drinking someone else's liquor and people may as well be drinking his. And Carter himself had brought Madie back to the States and settled down to raise a family. He had qualified for his pharmacy license and bought the little drugstore in Muncie that he had worked in so many years ago.

"Was it dangerous, Grandpa?"

"Yeah, sometimes it was dangerous. A few times one of my experiments exploded –"

"Just like now!" Alex interjected.

"Just like now," Carter agreed, laughing. "But my lab wasn't out in the shed then. It was underground and it made the tunnel cave in. I got trapped down there a few times. And sometimes there were people shooting at us."

"Were you scared?"

"I think we all were. But it didn't matter if we were scared or not. It was our job to do what we did and the job still had to be done, whether we were scared or not." Casting his mind back in time, he recalled his one of his own mother's sayings. "My mom used to tell me that courage isn't not being scared; it's doing what you have to do, even if you're scared. That's all we did. We did what we had to do."

"Are you boys ready for lunch?" Madie's voice called up the stairs.