The DU Lounge

My dad was in the Army. He was a farm-boy, so they made him an infantry scout, crawling around in the woods of France and Belgium after D-Day. He never talked about that much either except to say that it "wasn't like the movies."

He came home with a Purple Heart and a so-called "100% disability," which in his case meant a missing finger and shrapnel in his back that they said couldn't be removed because it was too close to his spine. None of that slowed him down at all. He got married, raised a family, used the GI Bill to get a PhD from an Ivy League university, and became a marathon runner.

The cliché is that "they don't make 'em like that anymore." I know that can't be true. I know they're out there, but there just don't seem to be as many of them.