Bill Sorenson
Bill was born and raised in Karst Valley, into a family whose roots ran deeper into the local soil than almost anyone else’s. His great-grandfather once owned nearly all the land surrounding what is now town, back when the road out front was still nothing more than packed dirt. Over the generations, though, that land slipped away acre by acre — sold off by aunts, uncles, and eventually his own father — until little remained of the family’s original holdings but stories and a name people still recognized.
Bill served in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War, arriving as the conflict was winding down. Rather than combat, his service was defined by a year spent in a supply yard, sweltering in the heat and listening to the stories of soldiers rotating home — brushes with a war he’d just missed the worst of. He came home, and life carried on: he met and married Janice, and the two built a life together in the same valley his family had called home for generations, raising two children — a son, Danny, and a daughter.
Danny graduated in 1999, tried a few years of college, but the pull of service — perhaps inherited, perhaps inevitable — never left him. He enlisted and earned his place in the 101st Airborne, the same insignia his own grandfather had once worn, and Bill made sure the patch was framed and preserved with pride. In 2003, Danny was killed outside Baghdad when his patrol was ambushed; accounts from his unit told Bill that his son had held his ground and helped save the lives of the men serving with him. Bill kept his son’s flag, patches, and photo displayed in the house ever since, a quiet shrine to a life cut short.
Janice passed away in 2015, and Bill has lived alone in the family home in the years since. His daughter, his only surviving child, hasn’t spoken to him since her mother’s death — a silence that’s left Bill more isolated with each passing year. A widower estranged from the last of his immediate family, and the last of a name that once meant something to nearly everyone in the valley, Bill’s days have narrowed mostly to memory, the company of his cats, and a house full of the kind of history that doesn’t get written down anywhere except in the people who lived it.