The soldiers of World War II were ordinary men who found themselves in extraordinary circumstances. Unable to ignore their obligations to their country and to the world, these men bravely faced combat. Many of them never sought reward or accolades, but simply returned from war, forever changed and forever humbled by the tenuous balance of life and death.
Each of the men depicted here—Joseph “Chip” Wiley, Jimmy DeValery, Harry Conners, and Theodore Rodgers—had lives, families, and careers they left behind. But they were not the only ones to report for duty: their families also had to fight daily battles through hardships, through defeats, through loss.
This book recounts their stories. Men, women, husbands, wives, sisters, brothers, children: all reluctant warriors, rising to incredible challenge of wars fought on every front.

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In his follow-up book to Reluctant Warriors, author Jon Stafford traces the impact of World War II on regular American men and women swept up by events thousands of miles away from home, and ponders how the continent that gave birth to Renaissance Humanism could descend into murderous chaos.

This historical fiction is a story about soldiers who went to the other side of the world to fight for their country and the women who remained home to fend for themselves and their families with few resources and no one to turn to for support.

World War II left no lives unchanged. After the battles had been won and the fallen buried, the war continued to reverberate for decades in the lives of the men and women who fought and survived, lost the people most precious to them, became disillusioned, and found a way to go on.

From Guadalcanal to the island fortress of Formosa, and from Tulsa to Sacramento, these stories show men and women finding redemption from the turmoil and chaos of war.