This last week, with D-Day celebrations and looking towards next week for Flag Day and the Army's 234th birthday, I have been thinking a lot about veterans and what they have done for us. Whenever my head turns that way I always settle upon the vets in my family and the two who mean the most to me: The Chief and my Uncle Dude.

Every family has a story or two like this. I have heard several and even experienced one myself with my mom, Betty Lou. But today's story is about Uncle Dude. His name was Don but for all my life and surely long before that, he was Dude... before it became used so commonly by teens with smoked-up brains and limited vocabularies. I had heard this story for the first time when I was very young, maybe four or five. When you hear about family stories, especially when you are little, you picture the participants as you know them. Anyway, it started like this:

Grandma woke up one night agitated and unable to settle down. She was pacing and crying and insisted that Dude was in trouble. Dude had joined the Army and had been shipped overseas somewhere. They knew he was in the Pacific Theater someplace but had no idea exactly where. She carried on like this for several hours. Sons and daughters and Grandpa tried to comfort her; they prayed and talked but nothing would calm her down. Then, as suddenly as it began, she settled down and said he was okay now. One intelligent family member was smart enough to write down the date and exact times this took place. It took a lot of time for letters to get home from OD...Out Dere...so the incident with Grandma was fairly old news and mostly forgotten when they got a letter from Dude describing the worst night of his life. He was in the Artillery and went ashore during the invasion of Leyte Island in the Philippines. One afternoon during heavy fighting, when the lines became very "fluid", Dude found himself alone and separated from his unit. The lines had shifted and he was suddenly far behind Japanese units. He told about how scared he was and how he crawled around in mud and tall grass all night long. He hid from passing Japanese soldiers, then followed them, hoping they were heading to the front. He eventually found the American lines and was rejoined with his unit. They had taken very heavy casualities and had believed him to be one of them. They were glad to have him back. That was all the story anyone ever got from him. He never explained what he had to do to evade the Japanese and how he managed to get through them and back into American positions. But I know there was a lot of the story left untold. The war ended and the troops came home. Uncle Jimmy from the Navy, Uncle Dude from the Army, and homecoming celebrations and parades and all that went with them were going on all across the country. The heroes honored, the stories told, the spoils displayed. But Dude wasn't that kind of person. No stories, no display of medals, no big talk.

Next to the Chief, Dude was the most important man in my life. I have millions of memories of him. I remember how Grandma's house on "J" Street used to shake when he walked through, singing some Hank Williams tune. He was so big that I was afraid of him a lot of the time. But in all my memories of him, I only remember one time when he actually got mad at me (well, two if you count the time when I was in high school and thought I could broker a deal involving his business): when I was about five or six. I was rummaging around in some old boxes at Grandma's house and found some real neat Army stuff. Including a long knife; long and heavy and very, very sharp. Dude happened to stop by to have lunch with his Mom, and saw me with the knife. He was furious with me and scolded me no end. It shocked me because he had never shown me any anger before and this was way- over-the-top anger. The knife, I learned later, was a Japanese bayonet; all the other Army stuff was repacked and restored. And you can believe I would NEVER want to look in there again. The only explanation I ever got was from Grandma when he left; she told me that box held memories of hard things and little boys didn't understand and shouldn't be messing with them. The next time I saw Dude he was my buddy again and nothing more was ever said about it .

Dude died a couple years ago. He had just turned eighty. I was sixty. It dawned on me that if Dude was only twenty years older than me, then when I was born in 1947, he was twenty. Which means that when he was crawling around in the Leyte mud, he couldn't have been more than seventeen or eighteen.

So this is one of those stories that every family has...but this one is mine.