The tribute was for my grandfather, Eugene Brennan — Korea, the cold, a whole generation of men who didn’t talk about it. He’d pa*sed in the spring, and the Army put on a ceremony in a hotel ballroom with senators and donors and a head table at the front.
I wore my dress uniform, because you wear your uniform to a soldier’s tribute.
An hour before it started, my brother reached across the head table, lifted my dress cap off the cloth in front of me, set it on the chair beside him, and kept his hand on it.
“Take the hat off, at least. It’s Grandpa’s day, not a recruiting booth. People are looking.”
Somebody laughed. My mother looked at the tablecloth. Twenty-five relatives, and not one spoke.
Then my father crouched by my chair and told me, quietly, that there were donors here, and that compared to what Brett had done, “a career in the ranks isn’t exactly something people find impressive anymore.”
