My father and I traded books back and forth. A lot by Stephen Ambrose: “Band of Brothers,” “D-Day,” “Citizen Soldiers,” “Pegasus Bridge.” We both read “Once an Eagle” by Anton Myrer and “Flags of our Fathers” by James Bradley and Ron Powers. The list goes on.

I always liked getting the first pass at a new book we were both going to read because I knew the pages were clean. My father had a habit of lying in bed and eating this peanut-butter candy called Mary Janes, a throwback treat from his youth that I think Cracker Barrel still sells, as do a few old-timey corner stores scattered around the country. But his reading-and-eating habit meant that the page corners would quickly develop a sticky brown residue that would glue entire chapters together.

I don’t remember my dad reading any books about Vietnam. He didn’t talk about it much either. The only two stories I can really remember of his time there are about when he got malaria and when he stole a trash-can-sized tub of ice cream from a destroyer in Cam Ranh Bay. My mother said he walked out of “Apocalypse Now.”

So I didn’t read about Vietnam either. Just the Greatest Generation and the Good Fight they fought, to free the world of tyranny and all that. After a while the books all started to blend together. Soldiers fighting and dying for one another. Stories of unvarnished heroism. D-Day, the Atlantic Wall, Pointe Du Hoc. Nuts! in Bastogne.