“In this moving and absorbing book, Howard Mansfield tries to understand his father’s steadfast, lifelong refusal to discuss his service as a 19-year-old B-24 machine gunner during World War 2. There was guilt, of both the survivor and the killer … but mostly there was the shadow of a terror so intense and sustained that not even a long life was enough to escape. To speak of it was to re-enter it. It was … an experience so overwhelming that words diminished it, as if trying to draw a frame around the infinite.”

— Mark Bowden, author of Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War