Home to the Brave: Remembrances of war brought home to one small dot on a map

Modesto's only Pearl Harbor casualty really only had a Modesto mailing address. ... A prisoner of war captured by the Japanese on Wake Island tells a story of torture and hardship in a labor camp mirroring that of Louis Zamperini, the hero of the book "Unbroken" and the movie by the same title. ... A pair of World War II pilots who moved into a senior complex near Modesto compare notes and discover they were imprisoned in Budapest a few floors apart after being shot down five days apart. ... Two men whose lives intesected over North Vietnam in 1967 -- one keeping the other from a stay in the Hanoi Hilton --finally meet 43 years later through pure coincidence. ... These are just a few of the stories told in "Home to the Brave / Remembrances of war brought home to one small dot on a map.'" Jeff Jardine wrote these andscores of others during his 14 years as The Modesto Bee's columnist, and compiled them into this collection. All of the columns involve veterans and others who lived the Northern San Joaquin Valley. But these kinds of stories could have been told by people living anywhere in America.