“Of course I was. I was ready to wet my pants. I’d been good friends with Jimmy and he was lying dead beside me. I was trapped. They weren’t taking prisoners there, and if I surrendered, God knows what they’d have done to me for killing their officers. So I hung in and figured I’d take as many of them with me as I could.” He shrugged. “And you know, I wasn’t that scared of dying, not if I could go as quickly as Jimmy. I hadn’t met your mother, I had no kids depending on me for support. And at least I wouldn’t be cold anymore. At that moment, dying did not seem like the worst thing in the world.”

Fates worse than death…Jack understood that. But there was still the Purple Heart to be explained. Jack held it up.

“And this one?”

Dad pointed to his lower left abdomen. “Took a piece of shrapnel in the gut.”

“You always told me that scar was from appendicitis!”

“No. I told you that’s where I had my appendix taken out. And that’s what they did. When they went in after the shrapnel they discovered it had nicked my appendix, so they removed it along with the metal fragments. Somehow they got me to Hungnam alive, put me on penicillin for a week, and that was the war for me.”

Jack looked at his father. “Why’d you keep all this hidden? Or am I the only one who doesn’t know?”

“No, you’re the only one who does know.”

“Why didn’t you tell me sooner, like when I was eight, or ten?”

As a kid it would have been so cool to know he had a father who’d been a Marine sniper. And even as an adult, he’d have had a whole different perspective on his Dad.

My father, the sniper…my father, the war hero…yow.

Dad shrugged. “I don’t know. When I was finally sent home, I realized how many of my buddies weren’t going with me. Their families would never see them again. And then I got to thinking about all the NKs and Red Chinese I’d killed who wouldn’t be going home to their families, and it made me a little sick. No, make that a lot sick. And the worst of it was, beyond getting a lot of good men killed, we didn’t accomplish a goddamn thing by pushing north of the thirty-eighth. So I just put it all behind me and tried not to think about it.”

“But you kept the medals.”

“You want them? Keep them. Or throw them away. I don’t care. It was the photos I kept—I didn’t want to forget those guys. Somebody should remember them. The rest just happened to come along for the ride.”