In summer 2017, Justin Batt, the director of the Harbor Defense Museum at Fort Hamilton, New York, met a member of the New York Army National Guard’s 13th Coastal Defense Corps. The meeting wasn’t face to face. Nor did the meeting take place by telephone. Rather, the meeting was happenstance, and it would lead the museum director on a journey through time.

Batt had been directing the museum less than a year. He was combing through the roughly 3,000 museum artifacts for a new display to honor America’s and the Army’s 100th anniversary of entry into World War I. In the archives he “met” Army First Class Gunner Angelo A. Rizzo, a young man from Brooklyn, New York, sent to war in France in 1918. What he found led him on a mission to honor a legacy and inspire the next generation of Soldiers.