hi, this is going to be probably the final entry of me giving away the stories and endings and stuff about my book (the title is yet to be determined). here is my introduction to the book and an acknowledgment to those who inspired me. thank you.


This book is from and for the men I have known and heard about for my whole life. They are my heroes.

Graham Jaehnig- U.S. Navy
Gameel “Ted” Ayoub- U.S. Army
Leonard Colombe- U.S. Army
Fred Morrisette- U.S. Army
Arno Jaehnig- Union U.S. Army
Alvin A. Bourbannais- U.S. Army



I would hate to come off as pretentious, naïve or uneducated altogether, nor cliché, or lastly, a liar. I always have wanted to create something having to do with the soldier. Any soldier. My father loved history and I too, because of him, see things and find out about things and instantly a question comes to my mind: what is its history? But in the case of soldiers, my thoughts have always continued. To the human being who is a war soldier, there is something else deeper that we can’t see. A mystery. To kill brings the average mind much trouble. Ending a life that could easily be your own, or family members, or a friend is the horror of war. It, at least, now means, there is someone you will never have the chance to meet or see or touch or listen to or spend time with or fall in love with. It is the greatest tragedy. Appropriately for this book, it is book burning. Imagine if there was only one copy of The Bible or The Iliad, The Works of Aristotle or Plato or Dante. Throw them into a fire and imagine yourself.
If you want to get historical with me, don’t bother. If you want to tell me certain details are off, don’t bother. Don’t bother tracking the historical accuracy of my character. Don’t try and pin him to a specific unit, because you can’t. He is a number of veterans that I have known in my life. He is a hundred I have read about in books and have seen on TV, and movies and in parades and walking on the streets with out ever knowing them. He is thousands of men who met their fate, or escaped it, only to meet it again, inescapable, years later. He is a million men. He is Odysseus. He is Hercules. He is Alexander the Great. He is Napoleon. He is your dad. He is your Grandpa. You might see him in the mirror. He is haunted.

I am not writing this as if I have any real clue about what they know or feel, or as if I am any closer to them than you are, BUT, maybe people will read this, and look through some new eyes, as I have done while writing every word and drawing every mark, and will finally see that what some people did, at some time, whether they wanted to or not, changed something and they will never know us. They put themselves into history books. War soldiers aren’t movie actors who win battles and then disappear. They had to come home and try, the best they could, to blend back into normal life. They changed OUR lives by putting themselves into our lives. And most of us don’t even see it. We don’t even look. We live our lives, everyday, thinking things are set. Never wondering or searching. Never seeing beyond what is right in our faces. We are who we are and that’s it. That’s what we tell ourselves. That’s all we see. Everyday. Every single day.