Buses filled with elderly men lumbered down dusty Panhandle roads and rolled to a stop at the edge of a cornfield. Wearing suits and ties, some pinned with Italian military medals, the men stepped onto the reddish dirt and walked toward a small white chapel tucked amid the stalks.

They took turns entering the structure to read the inscription engraved in the floor in their native language: From the Italian prisoners to the companions who will not return. The men scanned the horizon for landmarks they remembered from the 1940s, when they spent three years in Hereford confined in a camp for prisoners of World War II.