My grandfather was a Navy mess cook on the USS Oahu, a gunboat on the Yangtze Patrol, when the war caught up with him. He was captured at Corregidor in May 1942, forced to march into Manila, and shipped to Japan on the hell ship Totoru Maru. Three years and four months as a prisoner followed, in camps at Osaka and Matsumoto.
I interviewed him when I was 17, over several Christmas visits at my grandmother’s house in Escondido. It took me decades to do anything with it. I wrote a version in 2014 that never got published, and I finished the final one, Behind the Wire, in 2025, from his postwar journal, interviews with family and my own memory of those Christmases.
Most service memoirs spend decades in a footlocker, literal or otherwise. The stories get packed away when the uniform comes off, the lid stays shut through the job and the kids and the retirement party, and the family carries the box from house to house without ever opening it. A ghostwriter’s job is to get the lid open while the person who packed it can still tell you what everything is.
How do I find a ghostwriter for a veteran’s war memoir?
Look for a memoir ghostwriter who works from interviews, records every session, and asks you about the war the way a good listener would, patiently and more than once. The writer needs to be able to get a reticent man talking about the worst year of his life.
Ask how many interviews they plan, and be suspicious of a small number. How is anyone supposed to learn your father’s voice in an afternoon? I do a lot of interviews up front, because writing in someone’s voice means becoming them for a while, and you can’t become a Marine from three phone calls. Every session is recorded, on Zoom, by phone, or in person on my tablet, and I say so at the start and in the contract.
Avoid agencies for this book above all others. An agency sells you through a salesperson and then hands the manuscript to a writer you never met. That writer has never spoken to your father and never heard how he talks about the chow line or the sergeant who got him through. Would you let a stranger who never met him give the eulogy? Veterans and their buddies can smell a phony in a sentence, and the buddies will be the first to read it.
Plenty of older people hate Zoom. Many of my clients prefer the phone or a table across from me, and local memoir clients meet me in a reserved room at the Safety Harbor library. Memoir clients in their 90s are fairly common for me, and a writer who can’t slow down for a man that age has no business on this kind of book.
Can someone write my grandfather’s war stories into a book?
Yes, whether he’s alive or not, though the book is richer if you start while he can still answer questions. If he’s living, interview him now, record it, and hire a ghostwriter to shape the interviews into a book. My article on interviewing an older relative for their life story covers how to get those conversations started.
If he’s already gone, the footlocker still holds more than you think. I’ve written memoirs from a deceased subject’s papers by interviewing siblings and family, and Behind the Wire itself leaned on a postwar journal and a family’s memories. Letters home, discharge papers, photographs with names written on the back, a unit history, the stories his brother tells at Thanksgiving: all of it is raw material. My article on finishing a late parent’s memoir from their journals and recordings walks through how that works.
Order his service records early. The National Archives lets veterans and the next of kin of deceased veterans request them, and it says basic records are free for those requesters. It also warns that some companies charge a fee for records the government provides at no cost. I hate that. Those outfits prey on grieving families who don’t know any better, and they sell them paperwork they could have had for a form.
Decide early whose voice the book uses. You can tell a grandfather’s memoir in his first person, reconstructed from what he said, or in yours, as a grandchild piecing together a man you knew only partly. Both work. Your own voice handles gaps in the record better, because you can tell the reader where they are.
What if a veteran can’t remember dates, units or places?
Then the ghostwriter asks differently and checks the record. People misremember, fold two events into one, and inflate or shrink what mattered, and a man recalling a war sixty years later does all three. I ask about the same thing several different ways to get to what happened.
Mostly I ask indirect questions about the life around the fighting: what they ate, what they did with a day off, who wrote to them and who stopped. Those stories produce the details a reader remembers. Dates come later, from the discharge papers and the unit history.
Put a map in front of him (the Pacific, or the old neighborhood where he trained) and ask him to point. A finger on a place can bring back a name that a direct question never will, and you’ll watch his face change when it does.
Where memory and the record disagree, say so in the book instead of smoothing it over. A reader trusts a veteran who admits he isn’t sure which island it was far more than one who’s certain about everything.
Can a veteran’s memoir include classified or sensitive details?
Not without a security review. Anyone who had access to Defense Department information has to submit material for review first. The Pentagon’s Defense Office of Prepublication and Security Review says current, former and retired DoD employees, contractors and service members, active or reserve, who’ve had access to DoD information must submit it, and it says review times vary with the complexity and volume of the material.
If that describes you, build the review into your schedule, and have a lawyer who knows national security publishing read the manuscript before you submit it. Retirement doesn’t end that obligation, and the review office’s own page lists former and retired personnel by name.
Sensitive goes beyond classified. Other service members are real people, and some of them are still serving. The man who froze under fire could be hurt by what you write, and some of the people in your story can sue. A good ghostwriter briefs you on those risks and shows you how to change details so the story survives and the person stays unidentifiable.
Nothing in a World War II or Korea memoir written from a grandfather’s journal is likely to need a security review. Anything from the last few decades, and anything touching special operations or intelligence work, needs a lawyer’s opinion on whether it has to go in for review.
Can a ghostwriter write a police officer or firefighter memoir?
Yes, and first responders have some of the best stories in memoir, because they’ve spent a career at the scene of other people’s worst days. A cop’s memoir or a firefighter’s memoir follows the same process as a veteran’s: long interviews, records, and a writer who can hear the hard parts and keep listening.
The legal risks are different. A police memoir is full of real cases, and real cases have victims, suspects who were never convicted, juveniles, and families who never agreed to appear in a book. Firefighters’ worst calls happened at real addresses, to real families. Change names, change addresses, and leave out anyone who could be identified from the details. My guide to writing about living people without getting sued covers the techniques.
Talk to the spouse, too. The person who sat up waiting for the phone to ring knows a side of the job the officer or firefighter never saw, and a chapter from that side of the kitchen table shows readers what the job did at home. Record those conversations the same way, and let the spouse decide what goes in.
Check your department’s policy and any agreement you signed on the way in or the way out. If you’re still on the job, find out whether you need approval before you publish, and get it in writing. Have a lawyer read the finished manuscript before it goes to a publisher, and bring in a lawyer at the start if any case in the book is still open or on appeal.
If you want the public to see what the job costs, from the marriages it ended to the calls you still drive past, that’s a book worth doing right. Aim the anger where it belongs, at a system or a policy, and keep it off the named sergeant who made your life hell, because a revenge memoir helps nobody and I decline them outright.
What if the worst memories are too hard to talk about?
Go slowly, and let the ghostwriter follow your lead. Clients cry in interviews all the time, and people trained to hold it together fight it hard. If the tears come, we drift onto something light and unrelated for a while, then return to the painful subject once they’ve settled. I tell embarrassed clients that the emotion is part of the book.
I let clients approach the worst material over several sessions, and I offer to leave it out entirely. They almost always insist it goes in. A man who kept a night locked away for fifty years deserves to decide for himself when the lid comes off, and a ghostwriter who pushes him is doing damage no book is worth. What to do if you cry during a ghostwriting session goes further into how those interviews work.
Your readers want the ups and the downs and the recovery. Clients drift toward one extreme or the other, the hero or the man who can’t forgive himself, and I talk them toward the middle, where a reader can believe them.
Why shouldn’t a veteran wait to write a memoir?
Because the people who can confirm the story are dying, and the veteran is one of them. Every year you wait, another man from the unit is gone and another box of letters gets thrown out.
I waited decades to finish my grandfather’s book, and the version I wrote at the end was built partly from my own memory of what he said at those Christmas visits. Those interviews exist only because I asked at 17. Plenty of families have nothing but a flag and a photograph. My article on writing your memoir while the witnesses can still verify it makes the full case, and this note to veterans who’ve been meaning to write is the short version.
If you’re the veteran reading this, you’re the witness. Your kids know the funny stories and the one about the jeep. They don’t know what you saw, and when you’re gone nobody will be able to tell them. Nobody is owed the worst of it. What you leave behind is your choice, and only you can make it.
Don’t wait for a publisher, either. Write it for the family first.
How do I start a veteran or first responder memoir?
Start with what’s in your house this week: discharge papers, letters, photographs, medals with their paperwork, any journal, any unit reunion booklet. Request the service records. Then sit down with the veteran, or with whoever knew him best, and record a first conversation about the easy parts: where he grew up, why he enlisted, what basic training was like.
Clients apologize to me all the time for not being writers. People hire a ghostwriter for exactly that reason, and a sergeant who can tell a story at the VFW can tell it to me. My ghostwriting service takes the book from those first interviews to a finished manuscript, and the Book Discovery Intensive is a shorter first engagement if you want to see what’s in the material before you commit. If you’d rather write it yourself with a guide, book coaching does that. The Ghostwriting Hub covers the rest.
These men and women carried the country’s worst days home with them and were told to keep quiet about it, and the agencies that now sell them a stranger with a template should be ashamed of themselves. Get the lid off the footlocker. Take everything out, lay it on the kitchen table, and let somebody who’ll listen help him tell you what every piece of it means, while he’s still in the chair to do it.
