Only after my grandfather passed away did I start to learn anything about him. I gave him a journal at Christmas in 1991, but never read it until after he passed away in 1997. I never really appreciated him until he was gone. Since I was fourteen years old when he died, I felt like the only member of our family who never related to him as an adult. I wrote this thesis with the intention of connecting with him in a different way, by exploring the character portrayed by the stories he left behind. Papa was always a storyteller, which is a trait the rest of my family shares, and I want to continue that tradition through my own retelling of his stories.

When he died, I knew he had been at Pearl Harbor and in Europe where he was wounded, but the rest of the details meant nothing to me at the time. Once I started reading his stories, however, I began to understand all that happened to him. Coming out of Pearl Harbor without a scratch on him is just as amazing as having a Bible and a compass in his shirt pocket that stopped him from being shot in the chest. These two stories alone convinced me that I needed to expand on them and to make them come alive. These are stories that have to be told; they are not cleverly devised fables, but what actually happened.

Unfortunately, Papa never gave a complete account of his war experiences, only highlights. For this reason, I have had to embellish in some places and make up other things completely from scratch. Papa's character is the only one I based on real evidence; all of the other soldiers, friends, and family members were written according to his accounts and my own supposition. The names for his family and the other Boy Scouts in the first two pieces are real, but all of the soldiers' names I made up. If I have one theme from this work, it is leadership. From parts about being "a real man" to examples of scout and military leaders to his own responsibility as a leader, I worked to incorporate it into as many circumstances as possible. Leadership has been a major theme in my life, both from my military and civilian experiences, and one thing I tend to observe about people is their leadership style and methods. For this reason, even though this work is not a leadership manual, I hope to give some positive examples of leadership development.