ABOUT A.E. DIMOND

Video Hear A.E. Dimond in an ABC interview on My Country to Defend.

A Wyoming native, Amy Elizabeth Dimond had a distinguished career in sports marketing and corporate communications for 15 years. She traveled to and worked in 32 countries, spending extensive time in Latin America.

On September 10, 2001, she visited the USS Arizona memorial at Pearl Harbor for the first time. She planned on writing the story of her grandfather, an Air Force pilot who was headed to Pearl Harbor on a military transport ship the day the Japanese attacked. "My great-grandfather had been orphaned at the age of eleven and faked his age to enlist in the Army-to fight in World War I. He had already experienced so much hardship in his life and he suddenly faced an unthinkable calamity. Our nation was at war again and his son was on a ship, bound for certain danger. It took more than a week before my great-grandparents received the news that the crew had circled in the Pacific Ocean and eventually returned to safety. During that time, my great-grandmother took her vigil by a radio, unmoved and crying for days. Theirs was a generation that had to survive years of war and hundreds of thousands of casualties. These were terribly dark times and, just when it seemed they might finally reach some semblance of peace, their son-in-law was called to serve in the Korean War. It struck me profoundly, on September 10, that this was a remarkable heritage. My great-grandfather didn't truly know freedom from strife until he was over 50 years old."

It was just a premonition, one she still struggles to articulate, that led Amy to believe she had another story to tell. "I felt the weight, the ultimate sacrifice of those 19-year-olds, buried in a watery grave. And I felt somehow as if a torch was being passed to me, as if I was being prepared for something significant. By the following day, we were under attack and life, as we knew it, had changed."

Amy was attending a Veterans Day luncheon in 2003 when she met the Rincon family. "I was mistakenly seated at the Rincon table and I expressed my heartfelt condolences. I knew Diego's story-I knew of his last letter home and the legislation he had inspired. Two weeks later, I received a call from Jorge Rincon, asking me to write the biography. 'This is it,' I thought. 'The legacy of a 19-year-old laying down his life for his country. This is the story I was meant to tell. The rest, as they say, is history."

Amy wrote the book in eight months, living with the Rincon family in the beginning and then living near Ft. Stewart to spend the remaining time with the soldiers from Diego's platoon. As one Marine wrote to her "in military speak," Amy "went on a mission" to see that Diego's story didn't die on the sands of Al-Najaf, Iraq. She now speaks on her experience and the lessons she's learned from such an intimate view on the War on Terror. "I've learned firsthand now what I didn't know on September 10, 2003: that we can still have the stuff of the Greatest Generation-that courage and conviction are timeless."

SPEAKING