To everyone on Decoration Day

May your memory be a blessing

When they played “Taps” at my soldier-father’s funeral, I felt my knees buckle.

He’d enlisted in 1953 after a silly scrape with the law. A local judge suggested he let the Army find a use for his boisterousness. Since he had already dropped out of high school to be a pool shark, he figured he’d try the military.

You wouldn’t have guessed it from that introduction, but my father took to military life and quickly impressed the brass — right up until the moment when he’d wise off, act up, or in some other way step outside the boundaries — and then it would be a quick slide to a lower rank. It was that boisterous nature, I suppose. He’d excel in military intelligence (five languages), jump school, military justice, the Geneva Conventions, and he was a mean supply sergeant. One officer wrote in 1971, “He should have been promoted to the next higher pay grade many years ago,” which means, I assume, the officer didn’t check my father’s record very closely.

He served around the world. My brother were born in Munich, I at Fort Campbell, (which I thought was named after my dad), and then we were out to the former Fort Ord, where my mother packed it in to return to Missouri. She’d seen enough of the world, and had enough of her soldier-husband. The divorce was acrimonious and my time with my dad was limited to once a year, and never overnight. His absence was a hole I filled by becoming an over-achiever, mostly to impress my soldier-dad. I also became a writer who sent him long letters about my interesting life. (Those letters were frequently lies.)

Meanwhile, he served three tours of duty in Vietnam, and only returned stateside after he was horrible wounded by a bomb blast during the 1968 Tet Offensive. He lost a lung, and the scars on his back looked like a roadmap to hell.

It is Memorial Day, when we honor our war dead. MSG Daniel Campbell did not die in combat. He died years after his service, of a cancer found among Vietnam veterans who were exposed to Agent Orange during their time in country. When the cancer was diagnosed, he forbade his children from seeking recompense. He was a soldier. He knew when he signed up that a horrible death was a possibility. We have honored that.

You would have thought, with the courts and my mother doing their dead-level best to keep him out of my life that I would have had a very different relationship with MSG Campbell, but as soon as I could drive, I made a point of meeting him when he was in town. I got honest in my letters, and when I moved into my own place, he was always welcome. No one gave better advice than my dad — and he was careful to wait to be asked. And no one told a better story.

My father was a flawed man, and he was the perfect father for me — fiercely supportive and honest to a fault.

Today, I will attend a parade and put my hand over my heart when the flag goes by. I will also tear up over “Taps.” There’s one line in the song below that makes me tear up, as well: “This one’s for the man who raised me, taught my sacrifice and bravery…”

Thanks, Dad. I will love you until the day I die, and if it’s possible, I will love you further.