Prologue

        This memoir began as a letter to my son Gregory dated September 9, 2006—a few weeks before his deployment to Iraq as a field artillery officer with the United States Army. My letter was an attempt to detail for him my life as a young boy growing up on the South Shore in Massachusetts—time and events he knew little about or could never have imagined.

From the time he was a little boy, I would carry my son upstairs when it was time for bed, give him a kiss and set him gently down in his crib. He would pull himself up and stand as soon as I left the room. Most nights I wouldn’t make it downstairs before he’d start screaming. During dinner one evening, I turned around in my chair and looked up the stairs at him standing in his crib crying out for me, “Dah…dah!” I said to my wife, “I can’t stand this anymore,” and I left the table, gathered up some of his books from the other room and went back upstairs.

With his outstretched arms reaching for me, I picked him up and asked, “How about we read some books together. Would you like that?” He nodded in agreement as I wiped his eyes dry, then we settled in next to each other on a bed I’d set up in his room along the opposite wall. He cuddled closer to me as I began reading. And from that night on for the next eight years he went to bed with me at his side. It was always ten books—he’d count them. Some nights, if I didn’t fall asleep myself, we’d read all ten a second time through.

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They were all adventurous, exciting and beautifully illustrated children’s stories: “Where the Wild Things Are,” by Maurice Sendak; the Uncle Remus tales of Brier Bear and Brier Fox and Brier Rabbit, by Joel Chandler Harris; several Dr. Seuss books, “The Cat in the Hat” and “How the Grinch Stole Christmas,” by Theodore S. Geisel and Audrey S. Geisel; and “Scuffy, the Tugboat,” by Tibor Gergely, to name a few.

In one of his books there was a fearful-looking, mystical creature from Australian folklore called The Bunyip. It was pictured in colorful detail across two side-by-side pages. I’d ask my son, “Do you want me to turn the page and see what’s next? By now he knew what was coming and said, “No…Bunyip.” As he got a little older he looked forward to seeing the Bunyip. “I’m not afraid of that Bunyip any more,” he announced one night with pride. It wasn’t long before I’d read the beginning of a paragraph and he’d finish it from memory. When he was really little, we’d finish the ten books and he would wrap his tiny hand around my right thumb and draw my arm over and around his little body. I’d hold him tight and he’d go off to sleep.

I watched as he grew into a man, playing high school football, baseball and basketball. After high school he went on to Fairfield University and Brown University, where he majored in Chemistry. He was named Captain of the Fairfield Ski Team and Captain of the Fairfield Karate Team—he became a piano player, a skater and subsequently a chemical engineer.

Following the never to be forgotten events of September 11, 2001, he came to my wife and me and said with complete resolve, “Dad, Mom, I can’t stand on the sidelines with this any longer, I’ve got to do something.”

Weeks later he kissed his wife and two small children goodbye, and left the quiet comfort of his home to become a United States Army officer. I acknowledged his decision, and then followed with, “At some point a young man moves out from under the shadow of his father and takes his own place on the stage. This is your life, not mine. You’ve put together a plan and are now executing that plan…I admire that. I’m with you, boy. I’ll always be with you, and you can count on that.”

I dropped him off at the Holiday Inn in Somerville, Massachusetts on a cold February morning in 2003 to join the other enlistees as they left for basic training and OCS (Officer Candidate School) at Ft. Benning, Georgia. After several months of intensive training and a year in Korea, my son received orders to deploy to the deadly and unforgiving Anbar Province in Western Iraq.

I had realized all along that if this day ever came I might never see my son again, so I figured it was time to answer the many questions he must have had for me throughout our time together, but had never asked. I wrote what I could given the constraints of time and handed it to him as he exited the briefing room with his M-16, his armored vest, and his loving heart. On December 3rd at 0600, I watched as my son’s flight, heavy with soldiers and weapons of war, lumbered down the runway at Fort Hood, Texas, lifting off into the early morning haze, bound for Iraq.