During the Korean War, in the early 1950s, my dad served in the U.S. Army for nearly two years.
For almost my entire life, that was the extent of what I knew about his military experience. He never spoke about it, and we never asked about it, mainly because my mom always said that we shouldn’t ask him about it.
“It upsets him,” she’d whisper. And, being a kid, I left it at that.
After years of this life-altering experience being … not discussed … it became a footnote in my dad’s larger life story. He was a Catholic, a plumber, and a Detroiter. What he was not, to put it mildly, was a man who trumpeted his military service. Not on Memorial Day and certainly not on Veterans Day.
Each year, Nov. 11 would come and go, and I can all but guarantee that neither I nor my siblings recognized it. No “Happy Veterans Day, Dad,” much less a thank-you for his service.
It never seemed like a big deal to him, and if it was, well, he never mentioned it to us. Actually, if it was important, my mom, as she’d often do, would pull us aside and urge us to say something.
Again, a footnote.
Or was it?
Later in his life, he shared with my brother and brothers-in-law that he had in fact seen combat and witnessed a fellow soldier being seriously wounded.
“Shot up pretty bad,” he said. Dad dragged him to safety and likely saved the man’s life. He said he never knew what happened to the man. Then he got quiet.
How I wish I had been there for the telling of this story. Or any other story about this time of his life.
It’s around Veterans Day that I wonder if Dad ever thought to himself, “Why don’t my kids ask me about my time in the military?”
My hope is that he instead thought, “Thank goodness my kids don’t ask me about it.”
As I get older, I wish I’d had the courage to ask him about it. Anything about it. Maybe if I had nudged him a bit or asked at the right moment, I would have discovered the subject wasn’t so off-limits after all.
At my sister’s house this summer, I was sifting through family photos and came across a half-dozen black-and-whites from his time in Korea. Goofy photos of him with his buddies, several with a few beer bottles in hand, others of just downtime in the middle of a war.
And good God, he was 21 years old.
I stared at each of them for a bit and wished for just a few hours with Dad to talk about those snapshots.
On this Veterans Day, it’s time I come to grips with the fact that Dad’s stories of basic training, the voyage to Korea, and his time in a war zone are lost to time.
Dad’s been gone a long time now, and I still think about him every day. And I’ve decided that from now on, when Veterans Day arrives, I won’t think about the unasked questions and untold stories.
I’ll think about the one story I do know: a young man who dragged a fellow soldier to safety, came home, and never mentioned it.
And I’ll look at this picture and say, as I always do, “Man, am I proud to be his son.”
