ABOUT THE BOOK

Born in New Jersey in 1923, Dave Fick left home for Duke University in the fall of 1941. Following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Duke activated a Naval Reserves Officers Training Corps producing student soldiers, nearly 4,000, making their way through the V-12 program during World War II. After serving two years in the Pacific, Fick returned to Duke, completing a degree in English while co-editing Duke’s literary magazine The Archive with the woman he would marry in 1947. In the beginning of a long career in advertising, Fick studied painting at the Art Students League in New York City, putting on canvas what words failed to convey, what it was like, being there inside the whale of a Second World 

War.

  Born in New Jersey in 1952, Lasley Gober graduated from Duke University in 1973. Having worked briefly in television journalism, she went on to raise three children while earning an MFA degree in creative writing from Georgia State University. Gober taught Literature, Film, and American Studies for 20 years at The Westminster Schools in Atlanta. Following retirement in 2014, she began a decade-long correspondence with her dead father, responding to letters he wrote to his mother 70 years before from an LST in the Pacific during WWII. The result becomes a daughter’s letter to the world, a gathering of war stories and human voices throughout the world sounding a call for

Peace.