The discovery, more than two decades after his death, of
my father’s World War II correspondence with my mother, opened a window onto a
past of which I had no conscious memory. Just eight months old when my
father was drafted, I was a little girl without a daddy for over two
years. Many decades later, sitting cross-legged on the floor of my
brother’s rustic northern Minnesota home, I had in front of me a trunk full of
musty old letters, each one enclosed in the envelope in which it was mailed.
The beauty of my old doll Franca paled in comparison with the beauty of those
poignant letters. Were they love letters? Perhaps not in the strict
sense of that expression. They didn’t gush. But they revealed both the
anguish of a young couple separated by war and the preoccupations of an
era. I read them, arranged them in chronological order, identified
certain overriding themes, and then attempted to bring them (and my parents)
back to life in a book of my own. It was a project that would take the
better part of six years. Behind
the Lines: A Soldier, His Family and the 10th Mountain Division,
the result of that effort, is the tale not just of one couple but of an era.
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