It was an unintentionally well-rehearsed routine. I would call my father each Memorial Day. He was enjoying his retirement in Indiana, where he grew up. I was out in California, where I was born and raised. We would exchange comments on the previous day’s Indianapolis 500, and then I would say, “Happy Memorial Day … not that it’s a happy day, is it Dad?” To which he would reply, “No, son. No, it is not.”
My father was a soldier. He did not set out to be one, but the world dictated otherwise back in the satanic onyx days of the early 1940s, and so he became a soldier. He fought long and well, huddled in his radio operator’s station aboard a B-29 over Japan, focused on the task at hand while thinking about the young bride waiting for him back home again in Indiana. He did his job, and then he went home. This is the soldier’s duty, after all: to fight long and well,…
