It felt so good after so long to see those words come to life beyond the many letters he’d started in his mind.

I have been remiss in writing and I cannot adequately express my apologies for that. We have been on the move for weeks. Exhausted by never-ending battles. Though I shared with you some details about Normandy in the past, I’ve determined that there are some horrors that are just too terrible to retell—or to relive. So please forgive the dual droughts of correspondence and of details.

Writing to you is a reprieve. I have spent countless bedraggled hours imagining the things I will share with you. But now that I am graced once again with paper and pen, I find that it is not the large events that I want to describe but the tiny ones. An odd thing, maybe, but those intimacies are really the things that glue life together, aren’t they?

For example. Having so little elevates the importance of everything one does have. I found a paper clip the other day. A paper clip! It was submerged in the mud and only the tiniest sliver of it was poking out. If the sun had not hit the ground in precisely the right way at precisely the right moment, I would have missed it altogether.

I dug it out like it was buried treasure and stuck it in my pocket. I’ve learned—we all have—that such a find should not be treated as trivial. And it proved to be true. Since that time, the paper clip has helped me scrape dirt from my fingernails, get to hard-to-reach places as I clean my rifle, scratch a game of tic-tac-toe onto a fallen tree trunk, and stir a scant pack of sugar into my canteen as a treat.

It reminds me of a time when I was a teenager and the country was hit hard by economic woes. I observed that transient men near our home would save and use anything they could find. A lost hair ribbon became a tourniquet when a man cut his arm on a branch. A collection of bottle tops found along the way could be wrapped up in a cheesecloth and rattle to scare off animals when the men slept outside at night. A discarded Band-Aid could be wadded up to fill a hole in a shoe.

So it is here. We have been reduced to scavengers at times. Forced to innovate from nothing. It is bleak. I’ll not sugarcoat that.

I want to believe, Margaret, that we will make it out of this. That no matter where I am after the war, I will never again take anything for granted. Not my life. Not a paper clip.

War changes a man, they say. And it is true. But it is not all bad.