One day, shortly after my twelfth birthday, he showed me a set of photographs he and his buddies had taken on the day the liberated the notorious Nazi concentration camp at Dachau. The unspeakable horrors caught on film, he said, were only a glimpse of what he had witnesses the morning he entered the camp.

My father, Joe Sacco, was the only child of immigrant parents. In 1942, he worked on the family farm near Birmingham, Alabama, and, like many of the young soldiers of World War II, he had never been away from home before being drafted. He had never held a weapon more powerful than a BB gun. He had never witnessed violence more intense than a schoolyard fight. And the first beach he ever saw was Omaha Beach at Normandy.

His is the story of how an innocent farm boy from Alabama left home, fought his way through Nazi occupied France and Germany, and eventually helped put an end to the Holocaust. After a year of fighting through the most historic battles of the 20th Century, it was at Dachau that he and his buddies truly discovered the meaning of their mission.

Where the Birds Never Sing is not a book about weapons or battles or military strategy. Instead, it's a vivid and, at times, heartbreaking description of what it was like to be an American soldier called to fight in a distant land.

My goal was to create a work that was both historically and emotionally accurate, conveying not only what happened as the war progressed, but how those events affected the hearts and minds of my father and his friends.

Though the book sounds serious, I've been told that it's impossible to read certain sections without laughing aloud ... after all, we're following the exploits of a group of teenage boys as they quickly become men. I've also been told that it's impossible to read it without crying ... men, women, and even high-ranking military officers have admitted to me that they've wept as the read the final pages.

I believe they weep out of gratitude for what the American soldiers of WWII accomplished.

My understanding is that most members of the American military during World War II never spoke of their experiences. Many would never share with those closest to them the depths of what they had experienced. And so we learned in school what happened during the war, but we never got an account of what it was like ... of how it felt to be fighting a war so far away from the homes and families they loved, enduring unspeakable hardships, suffering profound losses, all the while struggling to stay alive one more day.

This book, therefore, is for you. It's the story of your father, of your grandfather, of your uncle, of your brother. It's what he experienced, what he thought, and what he felt during the war. It's what soldiers have always felt. It's what they feel now as they go away to defend our country.

My father told me that for several years after WWII, he would not speak about it. He didn't think anyone would be able to fully understand the magnitude and significance of what he and his buddies had experienced. His eventual decision to tell me about the war and to show me the photographs of Dachau, therefore, was not made lightly.

He knew that the stories were heartbreaking and the images were frightening, but he thought it important for his children to understand what he'd witnessed firsthand so many years before.