“2019 Military Writers Society of America Bronze Medal winner Occupied is the story of a Norwegian family and their struggles to survive during the German occupation of their country. I started writing this when my wife became interested in her family’s genealogy. She told me that when she finished researching her family, she wanted to work on my side of our family tree. My mission was to find photos and stories on my father’s side of the family, so I started writing down what my father had told me about his growing up. Since my father was no longer alive when I began the manuscript, I went to visit my Uncle Thoralf and Aunt Thelma, my dad’s oldest brother and younger sister to make sure I was remembering things correctly. I wondered if maybe my father had stretched the truth, as he liked to put it. Instead, I learned that my father had not so much stretched the truth as omitted it. He and his brother had done things to resist the German occupation that their mother would not have approved of, things they had kept secret until I wrote this book. Occupied is a novel based on my father’s life.