We were not just competitors and colleagues, we were friends. We had a lot of opportunities to reflect on this in the last year. It was a competitive brotherhood.

More and more of the veterans are in wheelchairs and with breathing apparatus, and they've lost a lot of friends in the last couple of years. I see Medal of Honor winners, and more and more of them are infirm.

I've lost seven friends to smoking-related lung cancer. Each death was a long, agonizing experience.

One of the advantages of being a national journalist of some recognition is that you come across high-profile people, and many become your friends.

The year of my birth, 1940, was the fulcrum of America in the twentieth century, when the nation was balanced precariously between the darkness of the Great Depression on one side and the storms of war in Europe and the Pacific on the other.

In the spring of 1984, I went to the northwest of France, to Normandy, to prepare an NBC documentary on the 40th anniversary of D-Day.