Book excerpt: This is a story of my father who went to war as a soldier. Years after he passed away of cancer, our mother passed on to join him. We found among countless family mementos, most of them worthless a nondescript cardboard box filled with hundreds of letters he had written to her from the battlefields of France and Germany. His letters were very clear that in his time of need, a trial of terror fueled by Nazi bombs, she had been his salvation. She and their baby son gave him the reason he needed to stay alive. There in ink and sometimes pencil, he told her again and again of his dreams for the future while he lived each day in a world of foxholes and nerve shattering explosions, where each day death came to call. For him and every other soldier on either side, tomorrow was one day closer to the end, whatever that might be. In his letters he told her again and again she was the greatest love he could ever know. "Rusty Dearest" is their story.