Hi, I'm Melissa NADWarnie, and this is NPR's book of the day.

ABC News correspondent Martha Raditz has had a long career covering wars, embedding with the U.S. military, seeing firsthand the dangers and the human stories behind the world's biggest headlines.

In her latest book called The Hero Next

Door, Stories of Patriotism and Purpose, she tells the stories of veterans, everyday Americans

who might just live next door. In the book, there are examples of heroic acts, of sergeants

risking their lives to save their teammates and of families, left with loved ones

who are badly injured. She talks with NPR's Stevenski about some of the people that have stayed

with her. Our former colleague Martha Reddits has covered the U.S. military for decades. She did it here at

NPR and then at ABC News, all through the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and beyond.

During all those years, Martha has kept track of veterans meeting them on battlefields and following up,

often years later.

I have always considered myself kind of a bridge.

I can help those people who do not understand the military, who don't understand that these

are the guys next door who, four days before they were in a war zone, were in a minivan taking

their kids to school.

Martha Raditz tells the stories of veterans in a book called The Hero Next Door.

She's going to share just one story with us on this Memorial Day.

It's the story of Mark Little.

She first met him in 2007 when Mark Little was an Army second lieutenant leading patrols in Iraq.

Mark and Humvee he was in had rolled over an improvised explosive device, an IED, and those are so deadly. So Mark rolls over at,

here's a tremendous boom, but checks out, he's fine, but was kind of loopy. It turned out he had

a very extreme concussion. They told him he could not go anywhere, he could not do anything,

...