A multi-page narrative of one ancestor's military service — branch, conflict, theater, daily reality, and what it cost. Designed to be read, printed, and kept.
Twenty pages of designed narrative. Branch insignia, theater map, service summary, the daily reality, the conflict-at-a-glance card, the casualties data, the homecoming arc — or, for those killed in action, the procedural reality of a death in service that most families have never been told.
This was not the war the recruiting posters had promised. The men around him were younger than he had been when he enlisted, and the ones who came home would not be the same men who had left.
The unit's losses are documented in the casualty rosters. What the rosters cannot show is the way silence sits in a barracks the morning after — the empty bunk made up anyway, because no one wants to be the one who folded it for the last time.
Some men brought the war home in stories. Most did not bring it home at all. The work of remembering, the work of asking, the work of sitting with the gaps — that work falls to the family. This chapter is the beginning of that work.