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Before the Civil War, there were no national cemeteries, no processes for identifying the dead in the battle. There weren't any dog tags, and there was no next-of-kin notification. You didn't necessarily even hear what the fate of your loved ones had been. It was up to their comrades to write and inform you.

It's hard for me to imagine that some people in the CIA who had firsthand knowledge would be unable to recognize that this would be helpful information for a soldier's death.

I began to see during the civil war, in that part of the states of Missouri and Kansas where the doctors were shut out, the children did not die.

The mystery at the center of 'Burial Rites' is not who killed whom on the night of March 13, 1828. It is the mystery each of us encounters: Can we every truly know another? Can we ever truly know ourselves?

My father went into the armed service and I never saw my mother - I don't know what happened to her.

The majority of U.S. high school students don't know within 50 years when the Civil War occurred.

I went overseas hoping to prove that all our POWs were home. I came back convinced that they were still alive.

My father served as an Army doctor in West Germany in the late '50s and early '60s. As a result, he and my mother - both native southerners - were acutely aware of what had happened during the Holocaust.

I have two brothers buried in the military cemetery in Texas. I don't want to see any more of that.