My father was nineteen years old when he landed in Korea in November of 1950. He was a corporal in the Second Infantry Division. He was at the Chosin Reservoir when the temperature dropped to twenty-eight below zero and the Chinese came over the ridges in waves no one had warned them about. He came home in May of 1953 with frostbite damage to three fingers on his left hand and a quietness that never fully lifted.
He met my mother in Chicago in 1956, at a dance neither of them wanted to attend. They married in 1957. He went to work at the Illinois Steel mill in 1958 and stayed there until the mill closed in 1985. They told him he could retire early — he was fifty-four — and he did, but he never quite figured out what to do with himself after that. He had been a steelworker for twenty-seven years. He died in 2003 of a heart attack while shoveling snow off the driveway. He was seventy-two.
He never spoke about Korea. Not once. Not in fifty years. The closest he ever came was the night before my own son shipped out to basic training in 1998. He sat at our kitchen table and told my son three things: keep your feet dry, never volunteer, and write your mother. That was it. That was all of it. My son made it home from his two tours in Iraq and named his own son after my father.
This hex is for Dad. For Corporal Joseph Daniel Walsh, Second Infantry Division, 1950–1953. For Chosin. For the mill. For the silence that he carried alone because he did not know how to put it down. We see you, Dad. We have always seen you. This piece of Illinois is yours.