To the men and women of the greatest generation with gratitude and admiration — Tom Brokaw

If we are to heed the past to prepare for the future, we should listen to these voices of a generation that speaks to us of duty and honor, sacrifice and accomplishment. I hope more of their stories will be preserved and cherished as reminders of all that we owe them and all that we can learn from them.

My favorite reaction to The Greatest Generation, however, is expressed to me in unexpected moments- on a ski slope, in the airport, on a street in New York, in the Pentagon. Men about my age- cops, business executives, military men, construction workers- grab my hand, look me in the eye, and say, "I read your book. Thank you for helping me understand my father." Then they turn and walk away.

Any journalist would be flattered to have his or her work become a catalyst for reflection and examination, but I have no illusion about my personal role in all this. I was merely the reporter, the vehicle for people's stories and the lessons they contained. So many veterans said of their service during the war, "It was an honor," and I feel in turn it was an honor to have written about the people in that book.

I am a child of the American men and women who grew up in the Great Depression, who came of age in World War II and then devoted their adult years to the building of modern America- the remarkable people I wrote about in The Greatest Generation. As I walked the beaches of Normandy on the fortieth and fiftieth anniversaries of D-Day, I first began to fully realize how they had shaped my life. They were my parents and the parents of my friends, teachers, ministers, physicians, and hometown merchants, the men and women who showed me the way through their own exacting standards of hard work, sacrifice, and personal responsibility. I began to understand how much I owed them.