Iam 85 years old. One of my earliest and most vivid childhood memories is of the night our father did not come home for dinner. My older brother and I had been cautioned it would happen and that when it did happen it would mean he and the men in the company of soldiers under his command would have been deployed to an undisclosed location in Europe where they would join in what I later learned was a war against the tyranny wrought by an authoritarian leader and his autocratic allies.

As an adult, I did the math and realized our father was only in his early 30s at the time of their deployment. Still, he was enough older than the men under his command that he referred to them as his “boys” and they called him “Pappy,” a name my brothers and I later came to use for him.

We were among the for

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