Caleb keeps that photo in a plastic sandwich bag, zipped shut, in the inside pocket of his backpack. The one with the zipper that nobody else uses.
He’s carried it there since kindergarten. Every single day.
He doesn’t show it to people. He doesn’t talk about it. But sometimes, when he thinks nobody’s
looking, I see him unzip the pocket and slide the bag out just far enough to see his father’s face.
Then he zips it back up.
His father died in 2019.
Danny was a Navy corpsman. A medic attached to a Marine unit in Helmand Province, Afghanistan. On a hot afternoon in August, his patrol was hit by a roadside bomb. Danny ran into the smoke to reach two wounded Marines.
He saved both of them.
He didn’t make it back himself.
He was thirty-one. Caleb was two.
My name is Frank Halloran. I’m eighty-one years old.
