My 70-year-old grandpa has always been my hero. After his parents died, grandpa lived a very hard life with five younger brothers and sisters. 【小题1】 When he was 17, he decided to join the army to fight in the Vietnam War. And since he retired, he has been living in the countryside. He studied high school textbooks by himself and passed the National Examination with a high score.

His hard life has shaped him into a tough guy. Years later, he became a grandfather. 【小题2】

When he advised me to read newspapers and watch news reports more, I told him I found these things boring, but he explained that by watching news one is able to understand how the world works. So I tried to follow news updates as much as I could, and I soon became interested.

When I had a hard time practicing the violin, grandpa encouraged me, “【小题3】 It’s as important as success.” So I kept on practicing even though I often thought about giving up. In an open class the other day, I was selected by my teacher to present my progress in front of the whole class. It was then that I knew my grandfather’s encouragement had paid off.

【小题4】 One day, I really wanted to eat the cherries from our backyard even though they were not yet ripe. I picked one from the tree, and it tasted hard and sour. “You need to wait,” Grandpa told me. “It takes time for plants to grow, and so do you. Being slow is not always a bad thing.”

My grandpa truly is my hero. 【小题5】 He’s been there to guide me each step of the way in my life.

On March 25, 2010, Kate and David Ogg heard the words every parent dreads: Their newborn wasn’t going to make it. Their twins--a girl and a boy--were born 14 weeks premature, weighing just over two pounds each. Doctors had tried to save the boy for 20 minutes but saw no improvement. His heartbeat was nearly gone, and he’d stopped breathing. The baby had just moments to live.

“I saw him gasp, but the doctor said it was no use,” Kate said. “I know it sounds stupid, but if he was still gasping, that was a sign of life. I wasn’t going to give up easily.”

Still, the couple knew this was likely goodbye. In an effort to cherish her last minutes with the tiny boy, Kate asked to hold him.

“I wanted to meet him, and for him to know us,” Kate said. “We’d resigned ourselves to the fact that we were going to lose him, and we were just trying to make the most of those last, precious moments.”

Kate unwrapped the boy, whom the couple had already named Jamie, from his hospital blanket and ordered David to take his shirt off and join them in bed. The first-time parents wanted their son to be as warm as possible and hoped the skin-to-skin contact would improve his condition. They also talked to him.

“We were trying to have him,” Kate said. “We explained his name and that he had a twin and how hard we had tried to have him.”

Then something miraculous happened. Jamie gasped again—and then he started breathing. Finally, he reached for his father’s finger. The couple’s lost boy had made it.

Eight years later, Jamie and his sister, Emily, are happy and healthy.

Sharon Estill Taylor has no firsthand memories of her father. The World War II fighter pilot was shot down over Germany in April 1945, when Taylor was just three weeks old. When Taylor was young, her grandmother often shared stories about their fallen hero. “Nana, it’s OK,” Taylor assured her, “I’m going to find him and bring him home.”

Grandmother gave Taylor a silver box containing some 450 handwritten letters between her parents, spanning from their high school to the year 1945. Also included were six months’ worth of unopened letters. Taylor learned that on April 13, 1945, Estill had taken off to attack a railway station and destroy Nazi supply lines. She found a reference to a possible crash site near the town of Elsnig in eastern Germany.

With the collapse of the Berlin Wall, it became possible for Taylor to visit the potential crash site. She connected with German military historian Hans-Guenther Ploes, who agreed to help her try to find and identify any aircraft and human remains. In 2005, a team, accompanied by Ploes and Taylor, led a three-week unearthing. From the moment she set foot on the site, Taylor could feel that her dad was there. DNA analysis confirmed that the remains were his. On a sunny day, Taylor and her family buried her father’s remains at Arlington National Cemetery. Beyond fulfilling her promise to her grandmother, Taylor says her mission has been to get closer to her father and his legacy.

She has also come to realize that there’s an entire population of Americans who’ve lost parents and loved ones in military conflicts overseas and wish they knew more. Taylor shares her story widely, raising awareness of soldiers who never return from war and the significance of recovery efforts. An estimated 81,000 American service members’ bodies remain unaccounted for from past conflicts, but fortunately there are constant efforts to locate the fallen and bring relief to their families.

Taylor will never know exactly what her father’s final moments were like but she feels, in a way, that father has finally come home.