At 2am one recent Monday morning, Rishi Sharma woke to a knock on his window. He was asleep in his rental car, parked beside some woods in a suburb of Buffalo, in upstate New York. A policeman wanted to know what he was doing there. Sharma, who is 25, explained that for the past five or six years he has been travelling the world on a mission to interview every surviving combat veteran of the Second World War, filming each one in an effort to ensure that their stories are preserved for posterity.
The police officer was very interested. “He says, ‘Well, my grandpa is a Second World War veteran,’ ” Sharma explains. ” ‘He was on the USS Randolph.’ ” By coincidence, Sharma had
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