In October 1986, American veterans of the George Washington-Abraham Lincoln Brigade, which fought on the side of the Spanish Republicans in the 1936-1939 Spanish Civil War, greet old comrades at a fiftieth anniversary reunion in Madrid, Spain. Along with Spanish and other international veterans of the war, they revisit battlefields and bask in the gratitude of thankful Spaniards. The survivors, now in their seventies and eighties, consider the war an important chapter in their lives of social commitment. Leftist idealists who grew up during the Great Depression, they were alarmed by the rise of fascism in Germany and Italy. When Spain’s top military officers, led by General Francisco Franco, launched a coup against the democratically elected Second Spanish Republic in 1936, Nazi Germany supported their Nationalist Army with its Luftwaffe, one of the world’s most advanced air forces. The Soviet Union, Mexico, and France offered support to the government “Loyalists,” but the United States and European countries maintained a policy of non-intervention. Anxious to fight against the fascist Nationalists, roughly 3,000 American volunteers joined what was commonly called the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Few had military backgrounds. Many were African Americans or children of Jewish immigrants who had been involved in American Communist-sponsored struggles for labor rights. On the Spanish battlefields, blacks fought alongside, and sometimes led, whites. However, after brigade members returned home following the Nationalist victory, the United States government revoked their passports and considered them subversives because of the brigade’s U.S.S.R. support. At the beginning of World War II, they could not become commissioned officers or serve in intelligence units, and during the “anti-Red” hysteria of the postwar years, many were victims of the U.S. House Un-American Activities Committee and Senator Joseph McCarthy’s “witch hunts.” Many lost jobs and some went to jail. Following Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s denunciation of Joseph Stalin in 1956, many became disillusioned with the Communist Party. Regardless, they continued working within America’s trade union, civil rights, and anti-war movements. A Cold War propaganda film that shows how to spot a Communist highlights the era’s attitude toward and suppression of American leftists. However, during the 1986 reunion, Abraham Lincoln Brigade veterans remain proud that they fought the first war against fascism and consider it one of their many worthy social struggles. Ninety-year-old Dolores “Las Pasionaria” Ibarruri, a Communist revolutionary who became the Loyalist movement’s leading voice during the war, speaks intimately about the brigade. During a peace march in San Francisco, California, in 1989, two spry brigade veterans muse that Abraham Lincoln Brigade volunteers were “premature anti-fascists,” then “mature anti-fascists,” and finally “senior anti-fascists.”