But even if it was just another training exercise feeling the earth vibrating all around him lying with his nose snuffling up dirt in a foxhole barely large enough to contain his body with the awesome sound of treads not far above him and knowing that someday this would be real changed him. Changed his understanding of fear and his confidence in survival.

That night sitting quietly under the stars reviewing the day’s war games Abe Levine realized that he might not return to his family.

He might die in some European town or forest taking a sniper’s bullet in his head or being blown to bits by enemy mortar fire or not having a foxhole to dive into when a tank came after him.

He might never ever meet his Mutty.

That’s when he began his journal.

Mutty my little boy. I hope I will give this to you in person when you are my age and I am a bit gray and stiff with rheumatism. But if I don’t make it back I leave this to your wonderful Mamma to give to my little boy so he will know what his Daddy did and why his Daddy was not there with him when he learned to walk to read to throw a ball to become a bar mitzvah.

And so he should know how much his Daddy loved him.

Abe began the journal on a melancholy night when he’d briefly touched his own mortality. Yet once that night ended and when the sun arose his usual cheerful optimism reasserted itself he still found his journal an irresistible companion. Though somewhere in the distant recesses of his brain lay the sobering image of a child growing up fatherless generally he found that writing in his journal a pen in one hand a cup of bitter army coffee in the other offered a way of slowing down and revisiting the innumerable thoughts and emotions that raced through him during the crowded adrenalin-filled days of training allowing him to sort them out quietly in the calm.

Quiet and calm were at a premium nowadays. There were hundreds of thousands of American G.I.s all over England and every one of them knew something big was coming. You felt it in the air in the stepped-up training exercises in the increasingly tense reviews by the bigwigs in the nervous set of a colonel’s shoulders the anxious eyes of a major-general.

Invasion. They didn’t know where they didn’t know when. But they knew every lounging G.I. smoking in his barracks every junior officer learning and then teaching how to identify and use German weapons every paratrooper hurling himself out of a C-47 for yet another training drop — every American soldier knew that invasion was inevitable. And that it was going to be tough. Deadly.