It was just luck--the first letter of his last name--that sent Theresa Nelson's draftee husband to Korea instead of Vietnam. One of the couple's friends was not so fortunate; he was sent to fight in the war in Vietnam. Nelson's husband, Kevin Cooney, and his friend exchanged letters until the day that one of Cooney's letter came back with a stamped notice that the addressee was deceased. Cooney and Nelson soon learned that their friend had been killed in the fighting. Nelson, barely out of her teens and newly married, did not know how to deal with the war, or the death of her husband's friend. "We didn't know anything about life and death," she recalled in an interview with Authors and Artists for Young Adults (AAYA). She added, "it was easy enough to pretend" that the war "wasn't there." But some twenty years later, when Nelson, an...