It wasn’t until years after his death that I started doing research and piecing the story together. That’s all my grandfather ever said about it. They had set out in the morning with 30 tanks by sunset only eight had survived. He said his tank company had been nearly wiped out in a fierce battle - though it wasn’t a battle that anyone had ever heard anything about. I heard about a story my grandfather told at least once, not long after he returned from the war. Years later, my father told me that he would have liked to have found a way to forgive his father. My father was with him in the hospital the day before he died. My grandfather died from complications from alcoholism on the 55th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. The one story that has stayed with me is the one about the night he, in a fit of rage and in full view of my father, who was only 4 or 5, grabbed my grandmother by the hair at the dinner table, dragged her into the bathroom and stuck her head face first into the toilet.

When I was older I learned that after he returned home, my grandfather had done terrible things that no husband or father should ever do to his family. He was a war hero, like the men I learned about watching the History Channel, but for some reason, my father and I didn’t have much of a relationship with him. When I was young, I couldn’t shake an intense need to know everything there was to know about him. My grandfather, Harold (Hod) Chrisinger, was a rough-hewn man - undereducated and overburdened - who joined the Army in the summer of 1944 at age 18. But what I was really in search of was a story I could tell about my grandfather that didn’t make me feel ashamed of him. When I bought the tickets, I told myself it would help me help my father better understand his father.

I had spent a few thousand dollars to fly 7,000 miles - all so that I could retrace the route my grandfather’s tank company took during America’s longest and bloodiest battle in the Pacific Theater. My chest cinched like a belt around my lungs as I thought about all I had done to get to Okinawa, all the years I had spent chasing down answers to questions about my grandfather - and how far away from him I still felt. But despite the endorphins coursing through my body, I began to feel the thumping of a panic attack. The rain was warm it felt like we were getting a jog and a shower at the same time. It was the last day of our four-day trip to Okinawa, and my wife and I were thankful that the humidity had finally broken.

We ran in silence as the rain began to fall.

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