In 1944 Wallace Macfarlane left his assignment as artillery instructor at Camp Roberts in California to take a battery of artillery across Europe. He left my pregnant mother at officers housing in Camp Cook, now Vandenberg AFB.While in Europe he wrote a series of letters home. Always an elegant writer, these hand-printed letters chronicle the period and the journey. My sisters and I found them after his death in 1999, and recently decided to publish them as a brief window into real life in a real war. Nothing glamorous, nothing exciting, just life lived then and there.For years afterwards, members of the Trident battery used to come visit my parents in Julian California to see and spend time with our father.