I have before me a faded black-and-white photograph of a young man standing in front of a department store window. In the window is a mannequin dressed in 1940s midwestern finery – a dress with large, white lapels and a hat at an angle that, on a man, might be called rakish. The reflection in the glass allows us to see what the person sees – a bus, an office building, some unnamed, unburned American city at peace. He is barely a man.

He is dressed in a tailored winter suit – with a tie even broader than his lapels – that looks good on him. He’s holding the jacket to adjust it, self-consciously, and his ambiguous expression could mean slight embarrassment, or confidence that he knows he looks good, or both. He wears it like it’s the first good suit he’s ever owned, like he’s only owned it for a few minutes, like he didn’t expect ever to own something quite this fine. He has a thick, teased-out bounce of dark hair, is tall and slender and well-built. Pinned on his lapel is what appears to be a US Army Combat Infantryman’s badge.

I am in middle age now – almost exactly twice the age of this kid in the picture – and no matter how many times I contemplate it, I marvel. Not just because the young man in question is my father, who died many years ago. And not just because I was a late arrival in his life and knew him only as an older man. But because I know what he had been through to get to the point where he could sport that suit. This young man with his tongue in his cheek and playful attitude had participated in the liberation of Dachau; he had earned two Purple Hearts, one in Italy and one in France; in the latter country, he had received a battlefield commission, becoming an officer. In the Second World War, he had earned a Silver Star for triumphing in a machine gun duel in which, ‘despite bullets which shattered his field glasses and canteen, striking the rock ledge on which he was lying, the lieutenant retained his position for over an hour and directed machine gun fire which knocked out two hostile machine guns and an observation post, killed six Germans and played a major role in forcing the surrender of an additional 12 enemy’.

The photo was taken when on his leave in the United States after the war, in the winter of 1945-46. Angus Boyd MacLean was 21 years old. This year would have been my father’s 100^th birthday.

Whatever psychic burdens surviving the great slaughter-bench of 20^th century Europe may have imposed, Angus gave no evidence of them. The kid in the picture wears it all pretty lightly. For him the war, for all its terror, and the infantry, for all its deprivations, had been opportunities. I knew the man for 19 years and never once saw a sign of trauma or stress, although he did have a lasting sense of grief for friends who hadn’t had his luck. Angus cried at only two things: a bugle playing taps and talk of his own father.

My father would talk about his first 13 years as something perfect until it was taken away. His father – also Angus – emigrated from the Isle of Lewis in Scotland to Canada as part of a great surge around the turn of the century. Finding work on boats in the Great Lakes, he married a Canadian girl of English heritage, and they took a vacation to Ohio when she was nine months pregnant – as you do. Their only child had been born an American, and they stayed on. I have another photograph of my father, now perhaps seven years old, standing with Angus Sr in front of the general store the family had come to own and operate—my grandfather very Scottish-looking, my dad, in his old-timey sloped hat and his square, well-fed features, unmistakably American. To an extent maybe unusual for the more restrained poses of the time—the way my grandfather’s body is angled, his grin, his satisfaction, and the self-possession and confidence of my youthful father’s pose—there is a powerful impression of mutual adoration.

The onset of the Depression hadn’t been too hard of a blow – people still needed general goods – but what the economy failed to steal, cancer did. Still a relatively young man, Angus Sr died in 1938 when my father was 13. The store was lost. My father went to work at a market and then at autoshops while his mother became a janitor at his high school. Angus worked every day after school for four hours and full days on weekends; because he had never played or watched sport in school, I didn’t watch sport as a kid.

Angus graduated from high school in 1942 and soon the infantry had him. In training his large frame got him assigned to carry the automatic rifle; he was initiated into the army’s humane approach to personnel management when he tripped and fell into a dramatic ravine. The instructor leaned over the edge and shouted: ‘MacLean! Did you hurt that piece?’

In the Autumn of 1943, Angus arrived in Italy as a replacement in the Third Infantry Division. His first experience of major action was in a battle now largely forgotten except by historians and enthusiasts: the fight for Monte Rotondo. In handwritten notes made toward the end of his life he describes what happened with economy: ‘1943 – Nov – Joined Co I 30 inf – in Italy – went up Monte Rotundo as a Pvt – 200+ in Co – came down as acting Co 1st Sgt – w 26 men.’

There followed rapid promotion to staff sergeant, then service at Anzio, then the first Purple Heart when a house was blown up on the plain of Latium with him inside. There also came (I confess that the details here are family lore for which I have no documentation) an offer – perhaps more of a directive – from Angus’ battalion commander that he should receive a battlefield commission (promotion to the officer ranks) on account of the oversupply of dead lieutenants and the shortage of breathing ones. My father, who had grown accustomed to life in the ranks and who was, as odd as it seems, thriving, failed to give the matter serious consideration and responded unhesitatingly: ‘Sir, with all due respect, I don’t want any fucking thing to do with any fucking officers.’

My father entered Rome on 6 June 1944. The second Purple Heart came as a result of serious injuries from an artillery round near La Longine, near the Vosges. Angus was hospitalised and told he would be evacuated out of theatre. Reflecting on how little there was to go home to, and disagreeing with medical counsel over the severity of his wounds, he got up one day and made his way back to his unit, arriving in time for Thanksgiving dinner.

By his own later account, he was banged up but serviceable, and naturally welcomed back. But he was soon summoned back to the battalion commander’s office. The subsequent dialogue was reported to me as follows:

Battalion Commander: ‘Sergeant MacLean, welcome back.’

Angus: *Uncomfortably wondering why he is having this conversation.* ‘Thank you sir. Happy to be back.’

BC: ‘I have a question for you. Isn’t your appointed place of duty at the… field hospital?’

AM: ‘Well, sir, I suppose that’s technically true.’

BC: ‘I see. So you’re absent from your appointed place of duty? And given that it’s a time of war, I suppose that makes you… a deserter.’

AM: *Outraged* ‘Sir! I mean, at least I’m deserting the right direction!’

BC: ‘So you are. And that’s why there are two sets of paper here on my desk. One is for your court martial. The other is for your commission. One will be signed before you walk out of here. What’s it gonna be?’

And so was commissioned Second Lieutenant Angus MacLean, United States Army. I invoke filial privilege to declare these stories too good to check. However, much of what then followed involved episodes that at times sound fantastic but are to some extent verifiable: Hitler’s commando leader Otto Skorzeny demanded at an American checkpoint to surrender to an officer at the war’s conclusion, and then did so to Lieutenant MacLean – whom Skorzeny describes in his memoir as a large Texan, an understandable error. Angus was entrusted with securing the Japanese ambassador to Germany, Oshima Hiroshi, for several weeks after the war. Later, during Dwight Eisenhower’s time as supreme commander of NATO, he served as the leader of his security detail (checkable) and became frustrated with Mamie Eisenhower’s habit of serving leftover drinks after parties to soldiers standing post (plausible.)

Angus stayed in the army after the war because he was good at it, because opportunities at home simply couldn’t compare, and because he figured America would be fighting the Russians soon anyway, so why would he get out only to be drafted back in? All were reasonable considerations, which launched him on a 29-year career in uniform that tracked many of the Cold War’s inflections. There was substantial time spent in Asia, including ‘two and half’ tours in Vietnam, as he put it. His final job was as Deputy Commander of the Military District of Washington for Police, Security, and Intelligence from 1969-1972. If your parents were among those who marched on the Pentagon and tried to levitate it, Angus was on the other side.

Twenty-nine years is a long career, but Angus wasn’t yet 50 when he retired. Having transferred to the Military Police Corps while in uniform, he took a job as the first chief of the Metro Transit Police in Washington, D.C., while that city’s subway system was still in its early stages of construction. Around this time, he married my mother and then I came along. I adored him without reflection or condition. In the way of boys in happy homes, it never really occurred to me to give much thought to how he might feel about me. Everything seemed alright. When he died, I was still a teenager, a bit older than 13 and with our family much more secure than his had been in 1938 – but the experience of early paternal departure still came sharp and left something not fillable.

Coming of age between the end of the Cold War and 9/11 with a father whose formative experience was the Second World War set me at an angle to my peers, as far as foundational worldviews were concerned. At a very young age, mine began with the understanding that there had been this really bad guy, Adolf Hitler, who had tried to take over the world and kill all the Jews, and my dad had stopped him. There were other people, of course; Uncle Jack had been there, so had Uncle Jim and Uncle Frank. It was a far cry from learning about the war in a schoolbook—and of course contributed to my own conviction that I needed to serve after 9/11, in an American military that increasingly has become a family business.

The fate of Europe’s Jews played an outsized role in Angus’s life. My mother, his second wife, while Catholic, had a Jewish father, and in my childhood, she was given to talking about how this implicated us in the logic of the Nuremberg laws. In the spring of 1945, my father had seen a concentration camp for himself. Here again are his notes: ‘April 45 – Returned to 30 Inf –  Nuremberg – Lots of hard fighting. Enroute to Munich via Dachau – Horrible.’

These circumstances prepared the ground for one of my earliest memories. My father, my mother, and I were vacationing in Munich when I was perhaps five years old. Angus wanted to take us to Dachau, to walk the grounds and see the memorial. At the desk of our hotel, which was run by the US Army, he asked the clerk, a relatively young German man, for directions. They were provided, but after explaining the route, the clerk asked my father, ‘But why do you want to go there? You know it’s all just Jewish propaganda these days.’

My father was one of those guys who, while generally easy-going and averse to grudge-holding, had a temper like a summer storm, and was not averse to telegraphing that things could get physical. I remember his face turning white, then red. He leaned over the desk – he stood taller than the young clerk – and said in a measured tone, ‘I saw what happened there with my own two eyes. Don’t you fucking goddamn dare tell me that it was all just Jewish propaganda.’

I wrote earlier that I never saw evidence of anything like traumatic stress in him, despite the fact that he was barely a man when his country hurled him into the great whirlpool of European killing for 18 months – the things he did, the people he lost, the inhumanity he witnessed is at a different scale, with respect, to what later generations of veterans (myself included) tended to experience. Conventional wisdom would lead us to think it would have left more of a mark. The fact that it didn’t no doubt had numerous causes – his own hearty constitution played some role, as did his early exposure to tragedy and his desire to leave that behind and seek something more, to make something of himself, and the fact that the war made that path available.

There’s something thematically American in all that. But I think more significant still was the fact that he never had one single shred of doubt that all of it – all the dead friends and violent deeds and wild nightmarish dislocations from anything that a happy kid whose loving dad owned the corner store might reasonably have expected from his 19^th and 20^th years – had been necessary.

In a turn of events that I know is ordinary but seems to me nevertheless grounds for wonder, my oldest boy, whom my father missed out on meeting by 20 years, is his absolute doppelgänger.

He resembles his grandfather much more than he does me. He’s shyer than my father, but girls like him, which fits the pattern. He’s given to fits of barbarism but is notably a lover of rules. Put him in one of those old-timey sloped hats and photograph him in black and white, like that photo of his grandfather in front of the family store, and you could barely tell the difference. Stand me next to him and I’m sure my satisfied expression, complete with the more intense feeling it masks, would do justice to the emotions implied in the original. I hope my son’s 19^th and 20^th years are easier. His name, of course, is Angus.