A couple of weeks ago, I got an especially moving email from a reader. I heard from the granddaughter of an airman about whom I had written in my recent Osprey title, The Ones Who Got Away. There are so many books about men who died heroically in action, so my idea in this book was that had been to tell of the adventures of Eighth Air Force airmen shot down in World War II who did not die— men who faced the challenges of death or capture, but who heroically surmounted those challenges to become “the ones who got away.”

In this way, my book was designed to be a “happy ending” book, and here I was hearing from someone sharing happy endings about which I could have only imagined. She told me that “knowing most of his story, I found myself in tears reading about him and seeing his pictures in print.”

How could I not be moved by such words? These are the words that writers live for. Connecting with readers in this way is why we do what we do! Having this arrive in my inbox on the threshold of Veterans Day was especially memorable, as we are all thinking of those people who populate the pages of the books we write about World War II.

Since this book was published, I’ve found myself in a number of email conversations with various family members of these men, mainly children, and now a granddaughter. I’ve heard stories of the later lives of men who “were very private about their time in World War II,” or who “never talked much about it.”

I’ve had people tell me that they read things in my book that they never knew about somebody whom they had known all their lives. How can you not be moved when you’re told that you added an important piece to the institutional memory of a family?

Of course, I have found myself reminding them that I was only quoting things that had been written by their men in Military Intelligence Service (MIS) debriefs. I was merely relaying those words, many of them handwritten, of the men themselves. I am both pleased and honored to have made myself into a conduit between generations.

I admit that when I was digging these words out from the old MIS paperwork, I had little idea of exactly how this would resonate across generations. It’s sobering— and delighting— to think of these adventures of a few weeks or a few months as pieces in the grand jigsaw puzzle of a life that continued for decades.

This Veterans Day, I could be thinking about those three dozen or so men of whom I wrote, but I had already thought about them a lot as I was pulling the book together. So today, my thoughts rest with the people for whom these men “got away” in order to became “loving fathers” or “wonderful grandfathers,” and for whom they became the immortal memories of future generations.