I think my father lived in the shadow of a brother with whom he could never compete. This brother was well-liked, affable by all accounts. He died in combat in 1966, a casualty of the conflict in Vietnam. He died just shy of his 21st birthday and thus, he will always live and loom larger than his life in the memories of our family, frozen in time as someone who never did any harm, if only because he never had a chance. He’s untouchable. My father never stood a chance.

He tried to live up to that memory in his own way, but my father was always plagued by a sense of not belonging in his family. According to him, he is the bastard son of two married people who conceived him while married to other people. I qualified that statement because my father is also a pathological liar who has spent my whole life creating a fantasy world for his children to admire to replace the banal reality of his own life. By all accounts, he was a juvenile delinquent, a truant, a hoodlum. By some accounts, a snitch and a petty criminal, a drug dealer, a thug, and a philanderer. A husband and a father, a liar and a thief.

He joined the Marine corps to straighten out his life. When I was a child, my father told me about his service, how he was shot in the leg and earned a purple heart.But he didn’t tell me the truth, in fact, when confronted, he laughed at me and derided my gullibility. Somehow, I should have known it was just a story. The truth is that my father went AWOL. According to another family member’s account, my father ran before he could be deployed due to threats on his life by members of his unit who told him he looked like the enemy and to watch his back when they got to Vietnam. He was later covered by a general pardon, but rather than tell a rather interesting truth, he dishonored his name and his service, and the service of his brother who DID earn a purple heart after giving his life for his country. He concocted a story to earn his children’s respect and allowed us to believe a lie because it made him feel part of something bigger than himself, worth something. Even if it wasn’t true.

My brother followed in the footsteps of many of the other men in my family on both my mother and father’s side, joining the Marines and doing two tours of duty in Iraq and one in Afghanistan before he was sent home on medical leave after receiving shrapnel damage to his legs after a car bomb went off in Fallujah.

Veteran’s day always leaves me feeling conflicted about the violence of war and the selflessness of putting oneself in harm’s way to defend the person and ideals of a nation. I consider how we treat our veterans and how we treat new recruits and how we treat women and how we treat people of color. I remember the uncle I never met except through his pictures. I remember, through my family, his valor, his ultimate sacrifice, and the sadness my family still holds for the promise of his life cut short. I remember the worry I felt every day for my brother, a brother who I wrote to every day of his boot camp when we all thought he might snap from the fear and the strain. I remember the countless times he just showed up on my doorstep, blowing through like a force of nature, turning my house upside down for fifteen minutes before moving on. I remember him telling me that he only visited me to humor me, and the surprise in his voice when I didn’t seem grateful. I remember the pedestal everyone put him on and the creeping realizations that he is still the same self-centered person he ever was. I took pride in my father and then felt betrayed, angry, and embarrassed to expose the lie, another secret, another compartment in my mind, the straw that broke the camel’s back in our relationship.

You know what I try to remember? They’re all human. Our veterans are human beings with human failings and human hearts. Many veterans come home and become isolated, homeless, unable to reintegrate with a society that alternately worships and condemns them. If nothing else, I hope that is what everyone remembers on a day like today: We are all people, human, and worthy, if nothing else, of compassion.