He had traveled often to France as a boy on many enjoyable trips with his family, so McConnell felt called to help when the Great War started in 1914. By the beginning of the next year, he had organized a job for himself driving an ambulance on the Western Front.1 He worked along the line for almost a year, seeing the worst of battle in the trenches, while receiving a commendation and writing a well-received article for Outlook magazine about the war. It did not feel like enough. “All along I had been convinced that the United States ought to aid in the struggle against Germany. With that conviction, it was plainly up to me to do more than drive an ambulance.”2 So, he joined the French Foreign Legion, which allowed a neutral American such as him to swear allegiance to the legion and not to France. McConnell quickly joined their new Air Service branch to start training to be a pilot. By April of 1916, he joined six other Americans in a new squadron just for men from the United States that eventually came to be known as the Lafayette Escadrille.3