They were both bland, straightforward responses to inquiries by Jean Deschamps. But I understood why he’d been happy to receive them. Unlike the disappointments from the Canadian Army and others, these two were from men who’d apparently been with Antoine right up to the end. And they both expressed a willingness to meet with their late friend’s father. It took us a few days to trace the whereabouts of the two writers, one of whom turned out to have died ten years earlier, and more time still to secure the records I’d asked Lacombe to locate. The good news, though, was that by the end of all the digging, we had double confirmation that the surviving letter writer—Richard Kearley—was living outside Montreal. Apparently, the unit they’d both served in was of some renown, as Paul Spraiger informed me. “Wow,” he said, holding the paperwork in his hand. “The Special Service Force. I hadn’t realized that before. Those guys were amazing—a joint Canadian-U.S.
