I got a phone call late Saturday afternoon, the particulars of which I’ll share in a moment. But first, let me tell you about two bundles of documents that made significant impressions on me in the past. There’s a common thread through all these things — I promise.

Decades ago, when my grandparents were still alive, I recall pawing through a brown paper sack that someone had excavated from a closet in their home. It was full of old bits of paperwork from the 1840s and to the 1920s. As such, it was a weird grab-bag of family history, and endlessly fascinating to me. I spent hours pawing through it, but two items stuck in my mind. One was the telegram from what was then called the War Department informing my great-grandmother that because one of her sons had died in France during World War I, she would receive a payment of, as I recall, $60. The other was a handwritten letter from an Army doctor informing the same poor old woman that her other son, my grandfather, was so seriously ill with influenza that he wasn’t expected to live. Not only did my grandfather survive, he sat on the couch next to me as I read that letter from 1918 and told me the tale behind it — which I later incorporated into my first book, “What the Deaf-Mute Heard.”

But what I don’t recall seeing in that bag of documents was anything from him or his deceased brother written home during their wartime service.

A few years ago, after my mother died in the same home in the hills of North Georgia where my grandparents had lived, I found a stack of letters written by her brother, my uncle, during his service with the 517th Parachute Regimental Combat Team during World War II. I knew he’d been a paratrooper during the war and that he’d returned home unscathed, so I was excited to see the letters because they’d surely contain all kinds of great information about his experiences. Boy, was I wrong. They were deadly boring, full of mindless detail about the daily routine of military life. Only the last, written immediately after the conclusion of the war, carried even the barest hint that he’d been in any real danger.

I later found a history of the 517th PRCT, and learned that its 2,500 men had been in virtually every bit of nasty business in the last year of the European theater of World War II: The Italian campaign, the battle of the Bulge, battle of Hurtgen Forest, etc. The unit suffered a casualty rate of 82 percent. Its men won 131 Silver Stars, 641 Bronze Stars and 1,576 Purple Hearts. After reading that, my uncle’s utter lack of any suggestion in his letters that things were rough suddenly seemed like an act of mercy toward his parents.

The phone call Saturday was from my son, who is a Marine grunt in the middle of his second deployment to Iraq. He was part of the surge that helped pacify Anbar province, and his battalion came home with fewer men than with which it departed. Now he’s back in Iraq, and while things are calmer than before there is still ugly business to be done. One thing he mentioned is that he might be out of touch for a long while. But he didn’t share many details. Mostly we just talked about college football.

It’s interesting how such merciful vagueness among military men stays true through the generations.

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