“What did you do in the war, daddy?”

It was a question we Baby Boomers often asked our fathers — all of the millions of us whose fathers served during World War II, history’s greatest conflict, and something that in our child minds we could not even begin to grasp.

I had practically forgotten that question until I was cleaning out the garage a few weeks ago, and for the first time in my adult years, discovered a trove of documentation, illustrations, and photographs of exactly what my father did during World War II. In his records were references to the good, the bad, and the ugly of why we had to win.

My father was 31 on Dec. 7, 1941. After Pearl Harbor, he made himself available for the draft. Because of his age and his Hollywood movie-making skills, he joined a Signal Corps unit that filmed the war. The forgotten family history welled up before me like old film as I found the photos and letters of a gentle man who loved his wife, and an infant son he had yet to see, my older brother, Phillip, who was born on Christmas Day, 1944. It was a GI homecoming of the kind that you can see in William Wyler’s Best Picture Oscar classic of 1946, “The Best Years Of Our Lives.”

Read the Remainder at Task and Purpose