😮 I removed the handcuffs from a prisoner and recognized the tattoo of my dead father. He died in Vietnam three months before I was born; I never knew him. 💔 And this 67-year-old man, accused of stealing medicine from a pharmacy, had the same military badge on his arm that my mother has had framed in the living room for forty-eight years.
I knew what was expected of me. Fifteen years in uniform taught me not to put my life in that courtroom. The right thing to do was to keep quiet, let the system do its thing, and then, quietly, in private, pay his bail without making a fuss.
That was the right thing to do. That would protect everyone: my mother, her hero, my badge.
