😮 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 took my hand off my belt, stepped forward, and in front of the prosecutor, the judge, the strangers in the benches, I said aloud that this man had been on the hill where my father died. That my father died saving him. That the medicine he stole was for another soldier on that same hill, a man in a wheelchair who depended on him to stay alive. And continue reading …