The U.S. Naval Academy’s Class of 2002 was just beginning its senior year on September 11, 2001. Thirty-three of its 965 members this week will be publishing In the Shadow of Greatness: Voices of Leadership, Sacrifice, and Service from America’s Longest War, to remind the nation what it was like to graduate into war — the first class to do so since Vietnam. They have spent a decade at war at sea, on land (162 Marines were in the class of ‘02) and the air.

Battleland conducted an email chat with two of the book’s editors — classmates John Ennis, a Navy lieutenant, turned Pentagon speechwriter, turned IBM executive, and Graham Plaster, who is now wrapping up his Navy career, where he served as a surface warfare officer and a foreign area officer supporting UN peacekeeping operations in the Middle East.