Remembering the Warrior with Secrets

The secrets of his war are inculcated into the veteran who served. The question for his child is whether it is better to let his or her father serve as a strainer for those secrets or to learn them to get closer to him.

Chicagoan Settimio Damiani's daughter Lee has had her father's war diary translated from the Italian as a way to get closer to her late father and the harrowing life he led under fire.

Gadsden's (Ala.) Bess Estis unpacked her late father's war souvenirs and came closer to understanding his wondrous sense of life and love: “Really, I think it came from the killing and knowing you could be gone at any second.”

While the good news in both those cases is that children grew closer to their late fathers, learning secrets of dad through war does not always lead to such fairy tale endings. For every secret gained through battle that children go looking for about their warrior dads, there are probably an equal number that come looking for them. Recently, a forensic psychologist discovered by poking at the bones of a WW II vet that it was a stepfather, not a father, who a son had worshiped.

And there is the promise/threat of more to come as the army now has the ability to use DNA testing on the remains of its fallen soldiers and there are estimates that from one to three percent of fathers are misidentified. In the (May 26, 2008) Boston Globe story, Deputy director of the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command Johnie E. Webb Jr., is qutoed as saying, "You could really do a lot of damage to a family...We haven't totally come to grips with how we're going to handle it."

** Take heed and handle all of a father's secrets with care. **