This is a powerful story of heroism, loss, and love in World War II, as seen through the intimate lens of one family's experience, one family's war.

In this audiobook, we as listeners witness the devastation of war and the greater triumph of love, expressed in one soldier's revealing, wrenching, and ultimately uplifting letters and first-person accounts.

Growing up, Walter Carter knew only a few basic facts about his father: He was a family doctor who volunteered for the army, landed on Omaha Beach in Normandy on D-Day, and was killed by sniper fire 11 days later while trying to rescue a wounded soldier. Shattered by the loss of her husband, Walter's mother rarely spoke of memories that caused her pain for the rest of her life.

After his mother's death in 1995, Walter finds his life transformed when he discovers, hidden away in her attic, a journal and some 150 letters that his father had written in the months, weeks, and days before his death.

The discovery propels him on a journey of his own, and this audiobook takes us on that journey with him.

As Walter comes to know the father he never had, we too experience the anguish of wartime, his father's overwhelming longing for wife and family, the arduous training maneuvers, the harrowing D-Day invasion, and his final days as a battalion surgeon in Normandy.

Half a century later, two men travel to France together to retrace a hero's footsteps to a hedgerow near St. Lo, where sniper fire ended Dr. Carter's life.

One is the survivor who feels forever indebted to that fallen hero; the other is the orphaned son, moved to pay his respects to the father he finally knows.