When he returned, I saw puckered purple scars on his shoulders, belly, and thighs. Time had faded the marks, but his general color was so pale that they stood out like night crawlers on his skin. Before I could think much about them, Dad splashed into the water and started a game of submarine warfare with me, and I forgot the scars. After we ran out of submerging tablets, he set aside the toy and gave me “real submarine rides” underwater. I’d hold my breath and cling to his neck, then stare at his big freckled shoulders as he frog-kicked between the forest of white legs in the blue-green water of the hotel pool. Looking back now, that might have been the best day of my childhood—the day my daddy did something he hated so that I would be happy. The livid bumps on his shoulders and stomach did little to dampen my fun, but I didn’t completely forget them. Later I asked Mom about them, and I saw sadness come into her face.

“Daddy got those in the war,” she said.

“How?” I asked. “Did the Germans shoot him?”

“A different war. Koreans shot him, I guess, or Chinese. I don’t really know. Daddy doesn’t like to talk about it. So don’t ask him, all right? Not until you’re older.”

I promised I wouldn’t, and for a long time I didn’t. When I finally got up the nerve, at fifteen, Dad shrugged it off and said he’d been hit by shrapnel in Korea, but it was nothing to write home about. Those were his exact words. But if that was so, why did I always perceive a sense of shame when I saw him without his shirt, or wearing short pants? It was like walking into a room and seeing your father’s genitals, only a lot more awkward. Like Dad, I had a penis of my own. But I didn’t have war wounds. Even now, as a man, I have no firsthand knowledge of war. But after hearing Major Powers’s account of what happened in that ambulance, I finally have some idea of what my father did in Korea. Perhaps I also understand the sense of shame that went with his wounds.

Pushing through the men’s room door at last, I find Dad leaning over the sink. He looks like a man who’s been beaten by someone who knows how to hurt you deep without leaving marks on the surface.

“I’m sorry you had to see that,” he says. “I hoped you’d never have to hear that story. Korea wasn’t all like what happened in that ambulance.”

“It doesn’t matter. Nothing will ever change the way I feel about you. But right now’s not the time to talk about that. We have to move fast.”

“What do you mean, son?”