"A time would come when I learned a different side of Death--a peaceful, caring side. Of the release from pain. We became old friends, Death and I. Thus it was that I felt sadness though not remorse when I saw Death's shadow in the background of a case that had come my way." Dr. Ben Wofford saw the approach of death in a terminal cancer patient of his. But he saw a great deal more. As he and William Richard White came to know one another while fighting a battle they both knew could not be won, they learned that they had shared an earlier battle, a half century before, in the hostile jungles of the Solomon Islands, in a place called Guadalcanal. The shared confidences and growing rapport between doctor and patient compelled Wofford to write this book, a mostly posthumous account of one Marine's struggles against the horrors of war and the postponement of death.
This is the war in the Pacific that only veterans can tell. It is a reminder of the great debt a nation owes those who fight its battles. An unusual story about facing death in different ways and from different perspectives, it is both humbling and uplifting and echoes in the mind long after the pages are closed.
