‘I hope you’ll never have to tell a story like this, when you get to be 87.
I hope you’ll never have to do it.’
Marine veteran of the 1945 Battle of Iwo Jima, to his teenage interviewer

At the height of World War II, LOOK Magazine profiled a small upstate New York community for a series of articles portraying it as the wholesome, patriotic model of life on the home front. Seventy years later, a high school history teacher and his students track down over two dozen veterans residing around “Hometown, USA” who fought the war in the Pacific, from Pearl Harbor to the surrender at Tokyo Bay. They rescue and resurrect firsthand accounts of combat and brotherhood, of captivity and redemption, and the aftermath of a war that left no American community unscathed. Here are the stories that the magazine could not tell, from a vanishing generation speaking to America today.
-Featuring custom maps and never before published portraits.-