Editor’s note: This article first appeared on The War Horse, an award-winning nonprofit news organization educating the public on military service. Subscribe to their newsletter.
I grew up in the house my great-grandparents built, a home where four generations shared laughter, loss, and celebrations. These same walls that once harbored the joy of my grandfather’s courtship were the ones that eventually held the pain of the day my grandmother learned he had been killed in action during World War II.
While growing up in this same house, I always knew of a box of letters my grandfather, Otis Bryant, had written from the war, most of them addressed to his wife and some to his mother. I read one or two during childhood, but in my mid-20s, I felt compelled to read them all in chronological order.
He was my grandpa, and I loved him, but I never met him. Still, I wanted to know him because losing him left a large gap in our family: my grandmother became a widow in her early 20s, and my mother was left fatherless. I witnessed my mother’s enduring grief of never knowing him.
I relished every sentence of his letters. I would lay them out and invite my mother to read them as well, but she would just walk by and say that it was too hard.
I read them with deep curiosity, always imagining what he looked like and where he was in the battlefields of Europe. Through his letters, I found he was a very caring, thoughtful, and religious person.
“Pray for this war to end very soon,” he wrote in one letter. “If you do any more praying than I do, you are doing plenty. I have almost worn out one prayer book.”
He also had a romantic side and showed his true love for my grandmother.
“I wish to tell you that I love you with all my heart and that there will never be anyone [to] make me feel different.”He included a flattened flower in the letter around their wedding anniversary and said he was thinking about their wedding day four years ago and that he imagined all the hugging and kissing when he got home.
I smiled when I read, “You can look in a mirror and kiss yourself and that will be for me.”
He talked about being homesick and how he missed his son, 3-year-old Tommy.
“I hope Tommy [doesn’t] forget what I look like before I get home. Talk about me a lot to him, I bet he wonders where I am. I can hear him say, ‘Where’s Daddy?’ ”
The letters made me feel close to him. He seemed lonely when he wrote them, thinking longingly of his babies and wife back home while he was in unspeakable environments and, on some days, had seen battle.
He wrote as if everything was OK and he wasn’t in the middle of a war in a strange land. I tried to weave those two concepts in my imagination, but it was almost impossible.
As I read his letters throughout the years, my deep connection to him grew. I always wanted to visit him at his burial place in the Lorraine American Cemetery in France. I consider burial sites sacred since they are the final, tangible resting place of our physical selves.
Grandpa never got to physically come home, so I wanted to go to him. That trip came in 2025.
The year prior, I immersed myself in researching the 80th Division and the 317th Infantry unit, where he was assigned. I used the 80th Division Veterans Association website to review unit histories, oral histories, and morning and after-action reports to trace his last days and weeks and possibly even the location where he was killed. It was a profound journey of discovery.
I also found the Thanks GIs Association, which organized a two-day pilgrimage to the actual villages where my grandfather last fought. While walking on those village streets, I held against my chest a book based on a diary of a soldier who fought in my grandpa’s infantry. It held details of the fighting and what had happened in those villages. I envisioned it everywhere I looked.
I was also honored to meet two village mayors. The gratitude from them and every French person I met was palpable, even 81 years after my grandfather’s service.
I was simply blown away by the gravity of their emotion, of their thankfulness to me. I felt as if I was accepting thanks for my grandpa. And I was.
I also felt like an imposter because I certainly didn’t do anything. He was the one who fought, suffered shrapnel wounds, and ultimately died for their freedom and the betterment of the world.
It was surreal, almost spiritual, to receive that thanks on his behalf. As I stood before these people, a beautiful sense of synchronicity occurred because I was reciprocating gratitude back to them for remembering him.
I did not expect to feel so indebted to them. My loved one was taken so their lives and culture could continue.
I certainly wish he had come home, raised his two kids, and, 30 years down the road, watched his grandchildren play. I wish he lived a happy, long life with his wife. But sometimes soldiers must fight to the death for freedom.
As I traveled through those French villages, I better understood that thousands had to leave this earth in order to take down evil, and in those thankful eyes, I saw the results of the fight for their freedom. This bond that I felt between our two worlds was an unexpected gift.
My family’s world — forever changed by the ultimate sacrifice and loss of our loved one — and their world, also shaped by our sacrifice and the sacrifice of thousands, came together in a soul-stirring way that I will forever hold dear.
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