In April 1942, a thirty-year-old Army doctor named Sydney Shapiro shipped out from San Francisco, bound for Australia and, eventually, the jungles of New Guinea. He would not see home again for three-and-a-half years.
Longing for Home collects the diaries he kept through 1942 and 1943 — training camps in the Australian outback, the fall of Buna, malaria wards, native villages, air raids, and the long, restless months of waiting between campaigns. Through it all, one thing never wavers: his devotion to the wife he left behind, and to the infant son he would not meet until the boy was walking.
"My only fear of death is that I might not see Marcy again," he wrote from aboard a troop convoy, submarines rumored below. That fear — and that love — runs through nearly every page that follows.
Told in his own words, often written the same day the events occurred, this is a firsthand account of one man's war: the boredom and the terror, the friendships and the homesickness, the small pleasures of a letter from home. It is a portrait of a generation of young men who left ordinary lives for the other side of the world, and of the families who waited for their return.