You are holding this manuscript thanks to a happy accident, or perhaps providence. For it is unlikely that the person who wrote these memoirs wanted fame or anything like that. But the feat that he accomplished, surviving the war and emerging victorious from it, and the sacrifices that he made, should at least somehow pay off with our attention to his story and gratitude for how he lived and what he did as an edification to all of us. I deliberately left the text unedited so that you could “hear” the voice of that time “from the horse’s mouth.”