My life as a writer started when I was about four. My older siblings introduced me to letters. They showed me how a person can put letters together to form words. Then, it wasn’t long before I discovered that if a person adds more words together to form sentences, then the person can use sentences to share their thoughts about the world with other humans.

I was hooked on words and their transformative ability to help the writer, the listener, and the reader learn and grow. I pursued degrees in Literature, Writing, and History. I taught writing and literature on the college level but decided that I hated being poor, so I moved on to the corporate world. I worked for news media, hospitals, law firms, nuclear, gas, and electric cooperatives, restaurant and pharmaceutical industries, even banking institutions. What did I discover? That all of those fields were desperate for writers who could understand their field and translate their industry jargon to everyday language so that they could connect on a human level with their stakeholders. I loved corporate work. It made me feel that I contributed by using my favorite tool - words.

Then along came an opportunity I couldn’t turn down. After all, can most daughters turn down their own mother’s requests? My mother had been a combat nurse in WWII, had served in a Third Army evacuation unit, and had been a word lover herself. She was a prolific letter writer during her time in service to Uncle Sam. She wrote hundreds of letters addressed to her parents and two sisters back home in Minnesota, chronicling many of her experiences as they unfolded just behind the front lines of battle in Normandy, Luxembourg, Belgium, and ultimately in post-war Germany. My maternal grandmother had the forethought to save every letter and, after the war, she hired typists to transcribe all those hand-written letters to type, then had them bound in big red volumes as a way of contributing to the family history and lore.

When my mother turned 90 years old, she gave me those letters and her army service diary, and asked me to “edit” them. I wasn’t sure what she meant by the word “edit,” but I obliged her. When I began reading them, I knew just enough of the history of that war to recognize that my mother had lived in the thick of some of the bloodiest contests Americans faced in WWII. Here was a story that needed to be shared not only with my family but everyone who would like to read about that war from the perspective of a 24- year-old naive American woman. I could tell that the letters were a bit sugar-coated and only hinted at the hell she and her fellow nurses endured.

I finished reading the letters and the diary, then called my mother. She was living with my sister Susan at the time. I said, “Mom, if I were to ask you to describe your feelings about that war in one word, what word would you choose?” She paused for only a couple of seconds and said, “Rage.”

Rage? Rage? That war had taken place 65 years before, and the first word she thought of was rage? At that moment, I knew she would need to come and live with me in Texas, and for the next two years she did just that, and I interviewed her. This was the beginning of a 13-year project that eventually became my book, For the Boys — The War Story of a Combat Nurse in Patton’s Third Army, Casemate Publishers, ISBN 978-1-63624-158-6.