Some of the most meaningful family stories are never told. They remain tucked away in a box of old papers, hidden in a drawer, or carried silently in the hearts of those who lived them.
This is one of those stories.
I was about twelve or thirteen years old when my curiosity got the best of me. Like most kids whose dad had a bedroom with the door closed, I sneaked into his room while he was at work.
Digging through one of his accordion files, I found what he referred to as his “important papers.” As important as many of those papers must have been to him, most of what I found was pretty boring—old check stubs, receipts, and other miscellany that people keep from years of filing away tax documents.
Then I saw it.
His WWII discharge papers.
Unfolding the crisp white document, something caught my eye. My dad had been awarded a Bronze Star and two Purple Hearts!
You don’t have to be a particularly intuitive young boy to figure out what that means.
My dad was a HERO.
At that moment, my father walked into the room. He wasn’t angry, however. He simply asked me what I was doing. I told him I had found his military papers and began grilling him about how he received his awards. He must have done something brave or noble to earn those medals, right?
“What are you doing?”
“What?” I replied. “Oh, I found these…” motioning to the papers in my hands.
Instead of answering, he looked me dead in the eyes and said,
“All I did was make it home alive. The real heroes never did.”
Those were the only words he would ever give me on the topic.
Decades passed, and through small snippets here and there, I discovered that he had friends that he lost “over there.” Like so many veterans of that war, they called it that. No names. Just “over there.”
He was like so many others from what has since been called the Greatest Generation. He didn’t talk about the war. What he saw and experienced was locked away in his heart. He never spoke of how he received the Bronze Star or his Purple Hearts.
After I fell in love with family history and grew up, I wanted to learn more. I ordered his military records from the National Personnel Records Center. That’s when I hit another sad, all-too-common roadblock.
The 1973 fire at the records center in St. Louis destroyed millions of Army personnel files, including most of my father’s military record.
Devastated, I almost gave up.
Then I received a call from the archives in St. Louis.
Most of his file was gone, but they had found some records that had not been archived at the time of the fire. Not much, but enough to start filling in some blanks.
The records that survived confirmed that Dad had contracted malaria in Burma. His dental records, along with a few other surviving documents, also gave me enough information to trace his path overseas through North Africa before eventually ending up in Burma.
My searching had now turned into detective mode.
Pouring over unit histories, military records, and anything I could get my hands on, I eventually narrowed his unit down to Company C, 1836th Engineer Aviation Battalion. Now many of the small stories he told me made sense. I remembered him telling me about playing basketball with some Black soldiers who were stationed at a neighboring base. That was something that was rare back then and obviously stuck with him.
Digging deeper, I uncovered just how important his battalion’s job was. They worked up to twenty hours a day with few tools to build two B-17 bomber airfields in Burma from scratch in just six months. Those airfields allowed Allied aircraft to fly deep into enemy territory and provided critical support for operations across one of the most challenging battlefields of the war.
I’ll never look at my father the same way again.
He once told me he didn’t feel that he was a hero. The heroes, he told me, were the guys who didn’t make it home.
But my dad was—and always will be—MY HERO.
Exploring family history is more than discovering names and dates. It’s about discovering the stories that never got the chance to be told. It’s about honoring the sacrifices that our families made for us and preserving those stories so that generations to come will know and remember them when those stories are no longer able to tell themselves.
Nomadic Roots Research 