My dad served during World War II with the Army's "Big Red One."  Although he rarely talked about his service, our summer vacations were spent exclusively visiting one army buddy or other throughout the northeast.  They fought in North Africa and Italy before preparing in England for the D-Day invasion.  My dad's unit landed at Omaha Beach at 6:30 on the morning of D-Day.  He remembered taking cover behind sand dunes and later how difficult the hedgerows of Normandy were to navigate around.  He spent the last phases of the war in Belgium and finally Czechoslovakia. 

When he came home he married a neighborhood girl who had loved him since they were children and settled into factory work, fishing on weekends and raising a family -- a kind, generous, gentle man:   my hero.