Twenty years ago, I found my father's true gift to me in a tall stack of dusty manila envelopes full of his letters, on top of a garbage can, waiting for the weekly pick up. Our widowed mother had intended to disconnect herself from her painful memories of World War II this way. In his letters home, Dad, not yet my father at the time, had carefully written down the details of his war in the North Pacific: Fighter planes touching down and taking off from their rolling landing site, chow lines meandering across acres of metal deck, kamikaze planes hurling themselves at his saltwater home. These were stories I had never known. Since rescuing them, I read all 646 pages of them several times. During the '60s, he had tried to create the book he dreamed of, but peacetime life got in the way. Dad died many years ago, but I have felt him with me, smiling, as "we" wrote this book.