Whether you read What Leora Never Knew: A Granddaughter’s Quest for Answers alone or as part of a book club, here are some ideas to think about or to discuss with someone:

Questions to Ponder

1. “Village by village the American Graves Registration Command is covering the battle areas of the world to see if it can find any clue that may lead to an isolated grave. . .” wrote Joseph Shomon in his 1947 history, Crosses in the Wind: Graves Registration Service in the Second World War. 

      Were you surprised at how long it took to find where Dan Wilson was lost?

2. Do you think that two of the bomber crew may indeed have been Japanese POWs?

3.  Would you rather that the bomber crew perished right away? 

4. Garrett Middlebrook was a B-25 pilot of the war in New Guinea. In his book, Air Combat at 20 Feet, he wrote, “God help a nation which forgets its war dead.” He also said that “if we do not revere our war dead, we are unworthy of their sacrifice.” 

      Do you agree with him? 

5. Michael Sledge, in his Soldier Dead: How We Recover, Identify, Bury, and Honor Our Military Fallen, said that “our national commemoration, Memorial Day, has been hijacked,” and now is a commercialized event. 

      Most Americans don’t know anyone close to them who was lost in combat, but could we do a better job of remembering our war casualties on Memorial Day? 

6. Have you ever visited a cemetery administered by the American Battle Monuments Commission, here at home or an American cemetery abroad? Do you remember the solemn atmosphere, even if you didn’t know anyone buried there. 

      Sledge said, in Soldier Dead, “Few of those who walk through the rows and rows of white crosses and stars are not viscerally overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of bodies that lie beneath them.” 

7. In The Rifle: Combat Stories from America’s Last WWII Veterans, Told Through an M1 Garand, Andrew Biggio said that “paying respect to veterans and honoring them enriches us as much as it ennobles them.” 

      How might honoring them enrich your own life? 

8. Kenneth Breaux, in his Courtesies of the Heart, said that “men who died so young have little history. We define them all too often by the manner of their death.”

      Do you believe that Dale, Danny, and Junior Wilson will be defined just as World War II casualties? 

9. “Thin places” is a Celtic idea where the veil between this world and the next seems thinner. In Chapter 28, Joy had the feeling that her uncles in heaven took note of what she’d discovered at home in Iowa. Have you ever experienced what you might term a “thin place”?

More about the book.