MY FATHER WAS A WORLD WAR II veteran, one of the many thousands who did not live to see the dedication of the new memorial on the Mall in Washington.

Though he would never have taken seriously the notion of "The Greatest Generation" he was certainly a part of it: born the year the Great War ended, a child of the Great Depression, married just two month after Pearl Harbor.

Daniel Carter Morrow served in the United States Army for most of the war, from early August, 1942 until October, 1945.

His division, the 83rd Infantry, landed on Omaha Beach on June 21, 1944, and moved immediately to Carentan, to relieve the 101st Airborne. He served with the division from Normandy to the Elbe.

A man of his generation, he rarely spoke of the war, and when he did, he rarely spoke of its horrors, though his division suffered more than 15,000 casualties, including nearly 3,300 dead, in five major campaigns.

Most of his tales were of pranks and adventures: trading "liberated" wine for winter jackets; getting stuck in the middle of a pontoon bridge on a mad drive back from leave in Paris; Thanksgiving dinner in Luxembourg City, believing the war would be over by Christmas; drinking too much Scotch when he got the news of my birth; giving his rations to German children; teaching them to sing "Home on the Range."

He only spoke of atrocities once, during the Viet Nam war, when the massacre at My Lai was headline news. "After Malmedy," he said, hanging his head, "we didn't take very many prisoners. No one's very proud of it. You're angry. You're scared. It happens."

That was it. Not a word more, no matter how hard pressed. It was only after my mother died in 1998, that we found his letters, scores of them, written to her nearly every day he served.

His letters from Europe were, in part, much like his tales of war. "As usual not much that I can write" was his most-often-used opening line, referring to military censorship which every now and then blacked out a sentence or two.

But now and then there were glimpses of the reality of war and the spirit of the men who fought it. Eventually, as the censors grew lax, he wrote of Santigny, the hedgerows and fearsome German artillery; of friends killed and wounded; of napalm ("jellied gasoline" he called it); of the Huertgen Forest and the Bulge; and of a firefight at some meaningless crossroads in the last days of the war; of British prisoners captured at Dunkirk and killed the very day they were liberated, in an ambush set by boys and old men.

On April 11, 1945, the 83rd liberated Langenstein, a slave-labor subcamp of the Buchenwald concentration camp. The prisoners still alive were sick and starving. Most weighed little more than 80 pounds according to one report, and they continued to die of malnutrition and disease at the rate of 25 to 30 a day.

"As usual not much that I can write," my father wrote of it. "Have seen some sights that one has read about but couldn't believe until actually seen. Have seen the reactions of liberated people, the happiness and wonderment in their faces when they realized that they were free. To watch them and hear them talk makes a big lump come in your throat and just a bit proud to be even a small part of their liberation."

He kept his medals in the bottom of his sock drawer: bronze star; good conduct; carbine expert; M-1 marksman; Europe-Africa-Mediterranean campaign with five battle stars; victory.

The new memorial would have pleased him greatly, though he would never have admitted it.