like when they landed in manchester, he said to his mother i arrived in the city where charles mclane lives. charles mclane went to manchester, new hampshire so he wasn't allowed to say really where he was specifically but they found ways to get around that. and the second was, how did they talk about sustained combat? >> trying to make things look nice for their family. did they talk at all about emotionally how they dealt with being under fire, knowing they would be under fire the next day and doing it the next day in the day after that in the day after that? >> i can tell you that the letters became more sparse when they were in combat. they spent a lot of time waiting around for combat during the battle of alamein. what i know about that i learned from the letters that they wrote later. the four of the five sent a lot of letters. they don't talk too much about how they dealt with fear. more, they talked about how hard it was to start losing men. that was the thing that really impressed them and it was difficult. that was something i think they could share. my uncle talked once abo