Dave Cubiak skimmed the headline as he ran the water over the dirty dishes piled in the sink. The Door County sheriff was normally neat about his surroundings, but with one of his deputies out sick that week he’d been getting home barely in time to fix supper and rinse up afterward. Cubiak glanced at the mess in the basin. Cleanup duty called, but he knew that keeping up with local events was duty as well. Cubiak brushed the crumbs from the table and sat down with the Herald. Braced for a piece of north woods fluff, he began reading. During his first year on the Wisconsin peninsula, he was often annoyed by the blur between hard and soft news, but gradually he’d come to understand that small-town reporting simply represented a different way of looking at the world. Where little happened, people were the news, and what happened to them mattered. The story captivated Cubiak. The three boyhood friends were World War II veterans who’d fought together in the United States’ only battles against the Japanese on American soil.
