Three vets, three lives, three stories.

I haven’t known many folks who served in the military. Not really. A few, but not many. But there seems to be a common thread running among them.

No, I don’t wait for Veterans’ Day or Memorial Day to remember them. To that point, here are three quick stories - more like observations.

The first guy I met who served was reliable, steady, conscientious, and punctual. He also was the first man I ever met in my life.

He was my dad.

My father served in the Army in the Philippines during World War II. As kids, my brothers and I always begged him to tell us a war story at bedtime. We didn’t know how lucky we were that he didn’t have any real fighting stories because the battles in his area had been fought before he got there. Our loss as kids, but our gain as his children.

But he came back from the war wounded - kinda. He had a tiny scar on his hand, which we really didn’t even notice growing up. His war story on that hand, which could be told in less than one sentence, was that he went to shut a window when it started to rain, and the glass shattered. Not the stuff of storybook legends, but not everything is.

My dad went on to become an accountant. He was much more comfortable handling an adding machine than a machine gun, a deduction than destruction. And so, he built a suburban life with mom and their three boys.

My dad was responsible from a young age, something I think benefitted him during those war years. I think he spoke for the Greatest Generation when he used to tell me that he did the best he could, and now it was up to us.

And there’s Robert. He’s a career military guy, a leader in what’s now called Special Forces. He knew and saw a lot of action around the world, the kind of scenes most of us would rather not see.

I, for one, didn’t.

I remember talking to him about wars and death. I’m a vegetarian and don’t like the idea of killing an animal, much less a person. But he knew he had a job to do, and he just went out and did it.

“Stu’s a nice guy,” he said. “I have to do his killing for him.”

Wow.

He knows what to say and what to keep to himself. He once mentioned that the military has top secret invasion plans for pretty much every country in the world, including, say, Canada. Of course, I asked him, oh, come on, tell me those plans - you can trust me. Crazy as it sounds... I couldn’t get it out of him.

After a long career, he used the knowledge he learned in the service to build, fix and run computers. It’s that military preciseness of doing it exactly right that I think has helped him become a true expert - a word I rarely use unless it’s earned.

The third man, a colonel named Harris, I only knew for a short time. He spent 35 years in the military, opting out just before he could have become a general.

Harris did things his own way - right until the very end. He very much lived his life in his own style, but within the confines of exactness that must have been developed, or at least enhanced, in the service.

I really didn’t know him very much, but I could see that he was a true shaper of men. He was someone who knew the path to go down, and no one was about to tell him not to go there. You would follow him, and there would be no deviation from the plans. And that was that.

Three men from a long, long line. Very different people, a very similar purpose.  

Stuart Green is a freelance columnist. He can be reached at [email protected].