In honor of  the many men and women who have fought and died for our country, I thought I’d tell my Dad’s story. He was a Captain in the Air Force, a bomber pilot in World War II.

He was a guy who first and foremost loved to fly. I think he learned to fly in the 1920’s, then joined the Army Air Corps in the 1930’s and was an instructor for several years. When the war started he continued to teach young men to fly, but by 1943 he couldn’t bear the thought of all of those young men he trained going overseas to fight and die so he volunteered to go overseas himself. He was in his thirties at the time, married with two children and was considered the old man of his batallion. He flew bomber missions in North Africa and Europe. Of the pilots who went overseas with him, only a handful returned. After the war he got a job, had two more kids (my brother and me), and almost never talked about the war or what he did. If it was mentioned, he’d joke and say he was a cook. I don’t think any of us ever really thought about the fact that he had fought in a war, that he could have been killed, that he watched men die. We certainly never thought about the huge adjustment he must have had to make in coming home. He went from being an officer who held the lives of other men in his hands to being an L.A. Department of Water and Power worker. He never whined about any of it; he got on with his life. I never had a chance to know him; he left the family when I was six, and I saw him only intermittently in the years that followed. He died in 1996 and I hadn’t seen him in 15 years.

A few years ago my stepmother sent my brother a box of memorabilia that my father had saved. In the box were letters from the young men my father had taught to fly. They thanked him for saving their lives, for giving them the skills that helped them make it back home. My father was a hero to those men. He did what he considered his duty and he never bragged about it or glorified it. This man who gave me life could have so easily been one of the ones who didn’t make it home, buried beneath a white cross in a foreign cemetery. He carried the burden of his survival around with him for 50 years. I think it must have haunted him, the fact that he had survived when so many hadn’t. He drank too much and had a hard time controlling his temper. I suppose in today’s parlance he suffered from PTSD. He, like so many veterans, was damaged by war: by what he had to do and what he saw. By the time I was old enough to grasp what it meant to have a father who was a veteran, I no longer had any contact with him. I’m sorry for that now. I should have tried harder to stay in touch with him, to maybe get a chance to hear his story from his own lips, to understand the impact the war had on him.

My father will always be one of the big “what ifs” in my life. So my way of thanking him now is to tell his story on this Memorial Day.