My brother and I are veterans dwarfed in the shadow of our father who stood tall at a time when good and evil were clearly defined. He was the navigator on 37 bombing missions during WWII, over half as the squadron lead. Discharged as a First Lieutenant, he received the Distinguished Flying Cross for his heroics.
After he came home he pumped gas until he was hired by a law firm. Eventually, the town fathers asked him to run for mayor, but he declined. Like so many others he served with, he rarely discussed his WWII exploits.
He broke that silence in 1994, the year of the 50th Anniversary of the D-Day invasion. My sister is a teacher, so he chose to address her eighth grade class and, as to be expected, he talked as if it were yesterday and revealed events that my sister had never heard before. That he would wait 50 years to open up was remarkable, but not unusual for those of the Quiet Generation.
As a young boy I became accustomed to going with my dad to visit the gravesites of those who didn’t return with him. He kept in touch with the crew of his B-17, the Windy Lou.
He left me with one memorable story told on a Saturday in November, 1956. I was ten when he took me out to a diner owned by a veteran. We were eating fried eggs when he recounted how he had just had a large breakfast when the siren went off at this air base in England. A few minutes later he was up in the air in a plane that was not pressurized, but his stomach was. I laughed, not knowing the next story wouldn’t come for another 38 years.
67Steffen.com 
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