Andrew De Kever — the son's book of other men's glory

FIRST EDITION REPORTED 2008 · SECOND EDITION, MERRIAM PRESS, 2012

The tie. Andrew J. De Kever is the historian's son and a former Mishawaka resident, in the South Bend Tribune's plain form; his working life is the Army's — an Iraq veteran who, when the Tribune wrote of his book, commanded a battalion supporting thirteen thousand soldiers in Alaska. The person stands in People, where this book is the counterpoint to that file's tested negative; the book stands here whole.

The book. Here Rests in Honored Glory: Life Stories of Our Country's Medal of Honor Recipients (Merriam Press, Military Monograph 15; first reported in the Tribune in 2008; second edition, January 2012) chronicles the lives of ten recipients of the nation's highest combat decoration, and it breaks ranks with its shelf, on its publisher's account, by "focusing more on describing the men behind the uniform rather than on the few minutes of valor" — whole lives, from the Civil War to Somalia, with a preface by Michael J. Durant of In the Company of Heroes. Five of the ten are Indiana and Michigan men: Daniel D. Bruce of Michigan City, William Windrich of Hammond, Harry J. Michael of Milford, Joseph A. Nolan of Niles, and Enoch Weiss of South Bend. None is Mishawaka's — the city has no recipient on the rolls, as People records — so the book belongs to this section as the city's literary nearest approach to the medal: a Mishawaka-raised officer writing the lives of other towns' heroes, the historian's household producing, in the son's generation, a different kind of memory work.

Sources:

1. South Bend Tribune, "Writing book was honor for DeKever" (2008), via the Mohammed bin Rashid Library newspaper index — the former-resident tie, the Merriam Press publication, the ten men and the five of Indiana and Michigan named.
2. Merriam Press, via ThriftBooks and Bookshop.org catalog records — Military Monograph 15; second edition, January 2012; the contents whole (Buffum, Rutherford, Weiss, Nolan, Dunn, Magrath, Michael, Windrich, Bruce, Gordon) and the Durant preface.
3. People (this record) — the Medal of Honor test, negative for Mishawaka on the Congressional Medal of Honor Society's rolls and the state lists.