From "Meaningful Doubts," a book about the search for my natural birth parents: "... pregnant and delivered me to my adopted Jewish family, because my paper father was Jewish, to provide a better chance (my mother believed) to be raised by. My adopted father, and the only father I called my father, was a chemist who developed a technology used on the first peroxide torpedo. That is all my father told me before he passed away. But my mother later on added how my father developed alternative explosives which were never produced. Someone had to stay behind and do the work my father did. No medals, ... stories or souvenirs from hand-to-hand service during WWII, but my father was an unspoken and unnamed hero to me, just the same. My natural fathers (one on paper and the other with DNA identifiers]) fought in the Pacific; one injured on an aircraft carrier and the other as a coxswain piloting the LCT Higgins-built landing craft. The latter father never knew of my birth with the woman he was dating. She left to begin the family she kept together for the rest of her life.

So I do not have just one, but three fathers all serving the American war effort and defining the stories of most soldiers. Not many can tell that tale!

By the way, I was a band member of the Hollywood Post 43 marching band called the "Sons of the American Legion," though none of my three fathers was a Legion member (that I know of).