Tell me a story, we begged as children, and stories still entrance us – from “reality TV” to the hot sales of memoirs to fiction in all its forms. But sometimes the very stories we miss are the stories of people close to us, especially if those stories are painful to the teller. But a true and deep understanding of history comes out of the stories of the people who lived it. High school teacher Matthew Rozell saw the power of story as he taught history each year, and that birthed a project in which students were encouraged to reach out to family elders who had served in World War II to invite them to speak of their experiences. This volume is a collage of sorts of the recollections of 30 or so area people who had experienced the war in the Pacific theater.

Some of the “voices” we encounter offer just a glimpse into what they saw or experienced. Nurse Katherine Abbott, for example, showed us briefly her “theater of war,” cargo planes turned into the most basic of sick bays, hopping from island to island transporting the wounded. “We would be there to … secure their litters to the walls … on each side of the walls and down the center, and it was just the nurse and the technician…There was no doctor.”

Walter Hooke offers a short but memorable section, recalling, his voice breaking even all these many years later, packing up the belongings of killed servicemen to return to their families, including the son of Roosevelt’s aide Harry Hopkins. “So I remember making up this little box and sending it to the White House, addressed to Harry Hopkins, with his son’s dog tags and wallet ….”

But the heart of the volume are the brief jottings of Joe Minder that sketch his tale throughout the Phillipines and into a prisoner of war camp in Japan and, finally, eventually, back to San Francisco at war’s end. His notes, according to the book’s endnotes, were written on any scrap of paper he could find. His simple snapshots of his story give us the history of war – mostly regular guys stuck in terrible situations, just trying to survive, and the best of them trying not to lose their humanity in the process.

Putting this kind of thing together is tricky, as there is not one narrative to lead us through time and place. For context, Rozell interspersed useful commentary that provided a sense of what was happening in the war at the time of the reminiscence and where the action was taking place. Unfortunately the prose in these sections tended toward the sensational, in stark contrast to the often understated tones of the people who had been there. Where the editor’s comments spoke of “astonishing defeats” and “struggles” to “hold the onslaught at bay,” the speakers themselves said things like “we hit them at dawn,” “I thought my number was up,” and the humorous “… it was rather difficult to fly when you have a rosary in each hand.” I wish Rozell had let the interiewees’ tone set the tone for the entire volume.

I also wish we had been provided with the names and brief bio of each interviewee – where they had seen action and what happened to them afterward — in one place either in the beginning or the end. As it was, with the voices interspersed, I was often confused about whether I had “met” any one interviewee previously, or who knew whom and why. I was also confused at what I would find in the endnotes versus the asterisked notes at the bottom of some pages versus occasional notes in parentheses in the text. Also, sometimes the editorial “voice” was in italics and sometimes in plain text as the interviews, so I was not always sure whose voice I was hearing.

These quibbles notwithstanding, I am grateful to Rozell and his students and the interviewees for giving us the story in this history, lest we forget.