My father’s Army serial number is O60887, which I memorized when I was young. Being the son of an officer, it is what you do - what I did, anyhow. I have not thought about it in decades, but if you asked me right now, I could give it to you without hesitation.
After my mother died at 95, Beth and I inherited my parents’ condo - the place we still live, the place I have written about elsewhere as the crypt, with its Korean scrolls and German war trophies and the two Buddhas facing each other across the length of the room. We set about renovating the 40-year-old bathroom. When we pulled out the cabinet beneath the counter, there it was.
My father’s dog tag. They are issued in pairs - one to stay with the body if the worst happens, one to go with the casualty report. There was only one behind that cabinet. Where the other went, I don’t know and perhaps don’t need to. This one had been sitting there for 20 or 30 years, perhaps longer. Through my mother’s last decades alone in the condo, through my father’s death in 1991, through whatever had accumulated in that bathroom since the day he put them there and forgot them or decided to leave them.
I knew they were his before I read them. The number that begins with O - I recognized it the moment I saw it. The metal also showed T40 and A - a typhus vaccination in 1940, and his blood type. Mine is A as well.
My father loved the Army. He went ashore in Normandy 18 days after D-Day. He spent 25 years sitting across from people broken in ways most men would have flinched from, because the Army needed social workers and he was one. He retired as a full colonel. There were 500 people at his funeral at Fort Myer, and I knew perhaps 10 of them. He is buried at Arlington National Cemetery, his ashes in a plaque set chest-high in the wall. My mother pressed her fingers to it the last time we visited, two years before her death, and said quietly: “I wish I was in there with you.” Today, she is.
The dog tags were in the bathroom all along. Behind the cabinet, in the dark, patient as everything my father left behind.
I have them now. The number I memorized 50 years ago is right there on the metal, exactly as I remembered it.