Every day, the American Battle Monuments Commission posts a photo on its Facebook page of the gravestone of a service member who died on that date, generally in World War I or II. After seeing those photos come across my feed occasionally, I began to wonder about the stories behind those granite crosses. Who were these men? How did they live and how did they die?

The vast majority never merited a mention in the countless books written about World War II, but those are exactly the type of people who won the war. Otherwise unremarkable men (and women) who in most cases reluctantly left the comfort of their everyday lives to serve — because that’s just what you did at that time — and never made it back. This site is my attempt to tell the stories of a handful of those 400,000 Americans who lost their lives in World War II.

A little background on me: I have been a writer, editor and web producer for various print and online outlets for 20 years. While the vast majority of my journalism career has been spent covering sports, history has long been a passion of mine, particularly World War II. It was a conflict that reached every corner of the earth, unlike any other event in our nation’s history. And as the incomparable Rick Atkinson has often said, even though thousands of books have been written about the war, the well of potential stories is bottomless.

Marc Lancaster | Matthews, N.C.