Serving in war thousands of miles from home brings unique challenges, and John Carr captures many of them in his book. Here, he talks about spending about 10 years putting this memoir together:

Q: What challenges did you face in telling this story, both as you kept the memoir and putting it all together later?

A: To start, there was a geographical challenge. Bushell’s story was waiting to be discovered on three continents. His parents lived in South Africa. He lived most of his life in Europe and some of the key players in this drama lived in the US and Canada. So there was the time, travel and expense challenge. Maybe that’s why nobody wrote his story before.

Additionally, there was the challenge of being a first-time author and the internal test of whether I had the competency to write a decent book. As I explain in the book, I gave up at one point and came back to it four years later. And at some point, any writer has to spend maybe two or three months, writing 10 hours a day, to finish it.