GREAT MEN AND GREAT DOGS

My father's words on his time in South Korea are private for the most part, but in time, I release them to my children, or I consider them with any new punch I take at writing of his life. A year after he died on March 3, 2005, I had compiled notes on his comments about the war and on the longer conversations we had about his time in combat. His sense of humor was intact, but his sense of timing was often impaired. Dad had a way of blurting out a new observation about war, about the Korean people, about the South Korean army, in the middle of dinner. I spent years in his room passing the salt and hearing him erupt into a story.

The routine was predictable. My beloved dog, Cassie, would amble into his room ahead of me and plant herself at his feet. He would rub her neck and gush over her character, insisting that she knew how to spell. Then, he would talk. The Chinese Army. The American military bureacracy. Dead children. Inch by inch, he gave me the war. Then cancer took him from me.

One night in South Korea changed him. I know of that night and why it happened, and I know that my father told me about it to clear his soul. I am not ready to tell my children that story. I wish that my father did not believe that the events of that night were something he needed to confess to me, but he did confess, and I let him do that. You do not tell a man to not confess, not when he has to. You do not judge his confession. You do not tell him that he didn't need to feel guilt. You listen. If he finally came to the moment where you were the person he chose to tell, you sit back and you listen. Someday, what you felt he needn't have confessed will make sense to you, and you will know who he was as a man.

It has not been five years since my father died. I have not mourned him. He would not want me to. Instead, I have discussed him -- with my children, with myself, occasionally with another person who does not know me well. For me, my father represents all the conflicting memories of so many men, and women, who saw The Korean War from the ground. For me, my father was not a hero, because he hated that people saw all soldiers as heroes. For me, he was my closest friend and the only adult I have ever trusted. When he bled his memories of war to me, it was the greatest time of my life. He trusted me too.

The day that Dad was taken from the house for the last time by ambulance, dying 11 days later at the VA hospital, Cassie paced the front lawn, observing the EMTs carefully loading my father into the rig. She was well used to them, the whole crew, and they were used to her. Dad had left in that ambulance four other times. I had once worked with them as an EMT years earlier. Cassie had knowledge. She understood when people arrived at the house to help my father. She peacefully paced, occasionally looking directly at a fireman or EMT with perked eyes. She never barked when they arrived at the house.

On that last tranport, Cassie moved among the crew, and they slipped around her. One of the EMTs patted her head and whispered something to her. She spread out on the lawn, staring at my father on the stretcher, and the EMT walked back to the rig. In a small town, rescue crews know the dogs who will be in the way, and they know the dogs who will set back and let the work happen because they are dogs who love their masters enough to let others take care of them when it is time.

For the entire time that my father lived in my home in the last years of his life, he was Cassie's master. She knew in those years that I did not need her, but that he did. She greeted my ex-husband when he came home, but then she would always walk back into my father's room. She sleep next to his bed. She stayed at his feet all day long. When the kids came home from school, she met them at the door, but led them into his bedroom. When I came home from work, she greeted me in a riotous body wave, and then again, trotted back into my father's room. My father loved dogs, but more important, he needed Cassie. She knew why.

She sat down in the driveway as the ambulance drove off, staring after it, the curve of her neck arched, her ears up. That was the last time she ever saw him.

I watched her walk back into the house, into his room, and lay herself down on one of his unlaundered sweaters, and I spread out on the floor next to her for a few minutes before I left for the hospital. I know that she knew. Great dogs know all about their human pack.

Cassie is gone now. She was old and she had a stroke. My children were with her and I was with her and my ex-husband was with her in the room. She had given us too much for us to just leave her there with the veterinarian and wait in another room. We owed her our happiness, our adventures, our sense of life. I can still smell her clean, water dog scent in my car. Her Black Lab father's face and color, and her Dalmation mother's sleek run through the woods, eased their last breath and were then spirits.

She is with my father now. I feel her running next to me on the central New York stretches of the link trail system, and I hear him calling out to me to run into his room to see Meet the Press on Sunday mornings. I hear her splashing, clumsily, in Chittenango Creek, and I hear him laughing when she leaps from the floor to meet the school bus.

The war is over only on paper. Dad wanted it to actually end. And he wanted Cassie to live forever.

You figure things out when they are handed to you, so obvious.