Dad's eyes swirl around the darkened psychiatric hospital room as he tortures himself with the Repo Depot Commando story.
Fred Shields served in the Army in Europe in World War II in a special unit called the 3rd Replacement Depot.
A sergeant, Dad's job was to lead his men in outfitting soldiers heading to the battlefront with supplies. The duty troubled him because he saw the assembly line of fighting men heading into war and felt guilty he wasn't joining them.
The battling soldiers mocked Dad and his men, calling them "Repo Depot Commandos." Dad would constantly ask his lieutenant: "When is it our turn to go?"
The reply was always the same: "It's not your job."
On this night, Dad tells the story with such torment that he grinds his teeth, repeating. "We never got to go, we never got to go."
My eyes fill with tears and I can hold it no longer, shouting: "Dad, the war's over. We won."
Yet I realize so many lost. It wasn't just the 378,000 Americans who have died in battles involving our country over the last 75 years since Dad joined the Army, but the close to 1 million wounded, many who came home crippled or without limbs.
Even more guys like Dad suffered in silence, reminding me of the words of New Jersey folk singer John Gorka's touching war ballad "Semper Fi":
"Sometimes the wounds that never heal
Are easiest to hide ... "
I hike in woods behind my home these days and deep into the foliage, I try to imagine the terror that went through American soldiers in the forests of Europe or jungles of Vietnam or more lately, the deserts of Afghanistan and Iraq.
As much as I try, I know I cannot replicate the paralyzing fear that must run through a soldier not knowing if the enemy sits hiding behind a tree with a bullet that could instantly end his life or a roadside bomb that could take off his legs.
"You think, 'I may never see my mom and dad or brothers and sisters again,'" my oldest cousin Joe McBride told me.
In the Army, Joe was wounded twice in Vietnam, once in a firefight where he was one of only 46 of 160 soldiers to survive, 16 able to walk away.
"My dad did it, my uncles did it," Joe said of going to war. "You have to serve your country."
That's why the furnace in Joe's chest ignites with fury these days at the pampered multimillionaire National Football League players, held up as American heroes for chasing a leather ball around a field, protesting the National Anthem.
"They get to protest because of us," he said.
Joe healed from the physical wounds of the war but still carries around the psychological scars, like the day after his return home when he was walking out of church and a guy called him a "baby killer."
"People say, 'I never knew you were in the Vietnam War,'" Joe said. "I say, 'That's between me and myself.'"
On Dad's last Veterans Day I sit tangled in traffic, squinting through the rain bouncing off my windshield, when I hear a radio announcer mention the day's significance. I tug on the wheel and twist myself from the mess, pulling into a restaurant parking lot.
I call Dad, who by this time was in a nursing home dying from the late stages of Alzheimer's disease.
"Hey Pop, happy Veterans Day," I say. "Do you remember, you were in the war, the Repo Depot unit?"
"Yeah?" he says.
But I know that he is gone. I once found an old wooden box he kept in the basement with war memorabilia, pictures of him as a young man in uniform, a map of Paris, and letters from Mom.
I still lament the words I couldn't say to him on that final Veterans Day, to thank him for his service as a 19-year-old kid in a foreign land pitted against strangers, all for his country. And there were five words I hoped most that he could hear.
Thanks for doing your job.
