My father, who died in his seventies back in 1996, served during most of the Second World War aboard the Coast Guard Cutter Taney, now one of the half dozen ships preserved as floating museums in Baltimore Harbor. I only asked him about the War a few times. He just didn’t like to talk about it. He told a few funny stories readily enough — once when the Taney was in port in San Diego, he and a shipmate hopped from the deck onto the dock, then strolled off to spend the day enjoying themselves, but when they returned that evening they found that the tide had come in, lifting the deck far above their heads, and the only way they could get back aboard was by hauling themselves up the ratlines. But talk about combat? The warfare part of the War? All I ever got out of him was a story about Okinawa.

He was on deck one day as an American plane approached a nearby aircraft carrier, preparing to land. Although the Navy issued its pilots frequent new approach patterns, my father explained — they had to make it impossible for the Japanese to use captured American aircraft to stage kamikaze attacks — and this pilot was using the wrong pattern. How my father knew this, I can no longer recall — were all the ships able to listen in to a single radio frequency? — but he described a long several minutes as the entire American fleet seemed to freeze, silent, as the aircraft carrier signaled to the pilot again and again to correct his approach … and finally shot him down. “We never learned what had happened,” my father said, “but you couldn’t get the idea out of your mind that it was one of our guys who just got confused. It made us all sick to our stomachs.”

One story, and that was about it.