Powerful memories built up on paper are the foundations of “A Full Measure,” written by Ames resident and former ISU professor Norman Rudi.

Rudi has been an Ames resident since 1961 and also taught as an assistant professor in the architecture department at Iowa State full time for five years and part time for seven years.

“A Full Measure” tells stories of soldiers, sailors and Marines who were injured in World War II.

“I selected these nine because their stories were interrelated in ways, but above all they were interesting,” Rudi says.

One man described in the book was in combat for 25 straight days. Rudi described how he was ambushed and hit five times with machine-gun fire, one of the shots stopped by a copy of the New Testament.

“There were five or six times he shouldn’t have survived,” Rudi says. “I remember him saying, ‘I had many guardian angels watching over me.'”

Rudi says one of the veterans in the book was from Ames and had joined the Navy to be a carpenter but became a surgeon’s assistant instead.

“Powerful stuff,” he says. “He said to me, ‘They say there are no atheists in the foxholes. I say there is no God. No God would permit those things to happen to young men who we tried to put back together.'”

Rudi recorded how each of the servicemen joined the military, where they grew up, their military experience and what happened when they came home. He says he was most interested in the military history and experience, but also attempted to capture some personal elements.

“I tried to include a wedding picture,” Rudi says. “I wanted to show that these were real people who returned home and looked alive.”

Rudi himself was able to build a successful life after his military service. He enlisted in July of 1946 – the war was over before he served. He returned to the United States in 1948 and his division was brought back in 1950. Shortly afterwards the Chinese crossed the Korean border and the Korean War began. He owned his own architecture firm from 1966 to 1994 and is married with two children.

Rudi says he does not find much difference between being an author and being an architect. He says there is a purpose and a structure to a building and, ultimately, the building and the story must both do what they were designed to.

In his writings, Rudi says he hopes people will learn at least as much as he was able to from the experiences within the pages.

“That’s the enjoyable part – how do you get the people to relate? You have to involve them and their emotions,” Rudi says. “And when you’re finished with a building, it has to keep the water out, and a book has to make sense.”