A Good Man

William talks about his motivation for writing A Good Man:

One day when I was fourteen years old, I convinced my father to tell me about his experiences in the European Theater of World War 2. My father, like most men of his generation who went to war, rarely, if ever, spoke about the subject, and certainly not with my siblings and me.

He told me that he had been a fighter and fighter-bomber pilot who spent the last two months of the conflict in a German prisoner of war camp. He related his story up to the point when he landed on the ground after bailing from his stricken P-47, which is accurately depicted in my novel, including the injury to his ear. He then said, “I’ll tell you the rest when you are older.” Sadly, he died unexpectedly about six months later, so I never got to hear the balance.

However, over the years I have been able to glean bits and pieces of his experiences from his pilot logbooks, from what he had told my mother, and from a close friend of his who was also a veteran of the conflict. I learned that my father did evade capture for some time, that once captured he managed to escape several times, and that he was tortured by the Gestapo as described which was possibly due to his having killed a sixteen-year-old German soldier during one of his escapes – an event from which he carried much guilt, so I was told. I wove the plot of this novel around these few known events and experiences. The rest is pure fiction.

Those who have never been in war are unable to truly understand what combat veterans experienced and its effect on their lives. There is much I wish I could have known about and discussed with my father – not only his wartime experiences, but more importantly, who he was as a man, as a human being. I will never have that opportunity, but I hope this book in some small way honors his memory.