From the editor: Two to remember

I knew one of the two men. There was no way for me to have met the other.

They were friends from grade school. They played together on the Esther, Missouri, high school basketball team—although, technically, both lived in a town then known as Flat River, a rough lead mining community, where Norman Rockwell images butted up against the reality of fistfights between teens from rival cities. They graduated into a world emerging from the Great Depression. Both men joined the Marines.

One was my uncle, Harold Thomas. Unable to find steady work, he enlisted in 1939. He considered himself lucky to be...