Hank Goode, the protagonist in my novel Goode Luck, is a WWII veteran. Although the story is not about his experiences in the Army, he, like most veterans, is affected by them almost daily. I wanted to get an idea of what he’d been through, so I sought out firsthand accounts of WWII military service.

John Steinbeck wanted to get involved but was too old to enlist as a GI and deemed too “communistic” for his request to be commissioned as an Air Force intelligence officer. He became a war correspondent for The New York Herald instead.

This collection of reports runs the gamut of wartime experiences with an expert blend of intimacy and detachment. Steinbeck doesn’t sugar-coat anything. The writing is spare and raw, ranges from humorous to bleak, just like the environment from which he reported. His work brought the front lines home to readers in the United States and gave me some understanding of what it must have been like to be there.