This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed human.

And we continue with our Memorial Day special all show long here on Our American Stories.

This one is a personal story.

It happens every Memorial Day.

I'm drawn back to a day long before I was born.

The day my mother found out her brother was killed in World War II.

It was before there were support groups for such things. Before we knew what PTSD was,

before anyone dared to talk about war and the carnage it leaves behind. The war was a defining

chapter of my mom's life. Almost every family she knew had at least

one son fighting in the war. After Pearl Harbor, my mom told us, men young and old alike rushed

to serve their country. Her brother John was one of them. He joined the army at 18, along with several other young men living in her

five-story walk-up in West New York, New Jersey. On a sweltering fall day in 1944, months after

D-Day, a black government car pulled up in the front of my mom's apartment building. Too serious-looking

men got up and walked up to the stoop. My mother, who was nearing her 12th birthday,

remembered praying that it would be someone else's apartment door those men would knock on,

and felt terrible praying such a prayer. She huddled near the door of her family's

apartment listening to the footsteps as the men walked up the stairs. Please, not our floor, she prayed.

Then the worst thing that could have happened happened. The men stopped on her floor.

It was John, she told me crying.

I knew it was John.

Within moments, the two men arrived at the door, followed by three knocks.

...