When Leslie was six, I got transferred to Fort Lauderdale and we moved into our very first house. We raised him the same way we’d been raised, with the love of God. He was a good little boy, always happy and always behaving himself. We only had the one, but he was even more wonderful than either of us had ever hoped. I told him about the war I’d been through like it was a movie, I told him about all the friends I’d never really had and about the hand of God, which had always been with me and protected me and which I praised every day for having allowed me to return, to marry his mother, and to have him, our treasure. Leslie listened to me, wide-eyed, and he played out the scenes he imagined me living through with his G.I. Joes. Of course, he didn’t know a thing about all the blood, the remains, the guys who didn’t die until they were drained dry, all the horrors no young boy should ever know about.
I did my best to pass down the values that had been passed down to me—courage, honesty, uprightness—which were the mark of an good man. When he got a bit older, he started picking up on how my being a policeman wasn’t as nice as being a soldier: people had plenty of respect for veterans but not cops. I told him that one was just as good as the other, but I could see he wasn’t so sure about that, and at that point I told him about the Army because that was what he wanted to hear about. I had no way of guessing that I was digging his grave.
Over the years, as I painted him a rosy picture of a war that wasn’t anywhere near that rosy, as I always made sure to pay respect to the flag raised in front of the house and to America, leader of the free world, I was planting a poisonous little seed in his head that he would water all through his school years. He was the best student in his year, he was tall and skinny just like his mother, with a sweet smile, and all the girls batted their eyes at him. But rather than go to college or trade school and get married and give us grandchildren, he told us that he wanted to join up and serve his country just like I had.
I ought to have taken his decision as a sign of respect, seen it as a son showing his love for his father, but I didn’t. It had been so many years that I’d forgotten it, but right there and then I tasted copper in my mouth.