I must have been thirteen. I know because my memory puts me in the house on Heatherwood Drive in Decatur. Also, I was of an age where I could be left alone, but was still immature enough I went prowling.

The house was quiet and cool, summer cool, a cool resulting from the open windows and the shade from the giant oak trees that lined our property line. It was quiet also. I was big enough to pick up Daddy’s desk chair. I moved it to the door of his closet. There on the shelf above the hanging clothes were the cardboard shoe boxes. I’d seen them over and over since we moved into that house. I knew there were no shoes in them.

Pulling the boxes down I arranged them neatly on Mother’s and Daddy’s bed. With cool deliberation of a child determined not to be bound by parental restrictions I opened the first box. Photos filled the box. Some had a brownish tinge to them, evidence of the stage of photography in that day. I sat down on Daddy’s chair. These pictures were fascinating. The pictures were of soldiers.

I stared at them in fascination. Wait! There was Daddy; and that was John sitting with him on a footlocker beside an army cot. They each had a beer bottle in their hands which they held upward as if toasting the cameraman. They had spectacular smiles on their faces. I would be many years older before I realized the contents of that bottle has much to do with the nature of those smiles. Another picture was of soldiers playing baseball. Wait! There was Walter, Daddy’s friend just down the street. Walter was at bat. Daddy was clapping his hands in the background. The rest of the pictures in that box were more of Daddy and his buddies, laughing, playing, joking, drinking. There were a lot of pictures of drinking. I replaced the pictures in the order I’d found them stacking the carefully the same way lest he discover I’d transgressed into his private memories.

The pictures in the next box were different. Even a naive kid as I recognized these as pictures of bombs impacting the ground and taken from the bomber formation, aircraft sitting on the runway with holes in the fuselage, aircraft burning at the end or the side of runways. There were also pictures of bodies, bodies being removed from the inwards of B-17s. What was this. There were no smiling faces in these pictures. These were images of death, cold, brutal, death.

The house was more quiet than usual. The summer cool had become chilling. I stared at one picture. How could a plane fly with that many holes in it?

It was that summer day, I first discovered my Daddy was a hero. He’d gone to war a kid and come home an adult with memories no one should have to endure. I thought of all Daddy’s friends who occupied the pictures in the first box. I thought about the second box as I, now with reverence, replaced it on the shelf. Instinctively I knew why they never talked about the war when they gathered on our patio to laugh and drink and dance with their wives.

Daddy never knew how I bonded to him that day. I never confessed my transgression. But I now knew why Daddy cried whenever the flag passed. My Daddy was a veteran.