Last fall, Megan Greenwell sat down to do some research for her book. She pulled up the website for the National Personnel Records Center and sent off a request for the military records for one of her characters. What came back startled her: "We are unable to locate a record with the information provided ... or the record needed to answer your query was lost in the July 1973 fire that destroyed millions of records."

Not long after, she happened to be looking for her own grandfather's military service records. She put in another request. She got the same reply.

This fire happened 50 years ago next week. Surely, Greenwell thought, someone has written about this monumental moment in American history? She began searching for stories. And she couldn't find much. So she dug in, started reporting, started writing.

As she says in the piece: "The federal government preserved exactly one copy of the Official Military Personnel File of every veteran. For the 22 million soldiers who served in the Army during World War I, World War II, the Korean War, or any of the myriad smaller conflicts in the first half of the 20th century, that single copy lived on the sixth floor of the National Personnel Records Center, stuffed into one of those cardboard boxes."

The resulting story is a beautiful deep dive into what happened that night half a century ago, when the sixth floor went up in flames—and the subsequent FBI investigation. But the piece also took Greenwell on a journey that led her to answers she'd been looking for, for a long time, about her grandfather, who fled Nazi Germany and wound up fighting for his new country.—Maria Streshinsky | Executive Editor