A set of dog tags, a clipping, a father revealed

As a child, I also wore a chain, but one with a Jewish star. Sometimes I would sneak into my parents’ room and replace my sterling silver chain with my father’s dog tag, imagining myself a soldier in the Army.

A faded newspaper article in the bag told a story about Dad: “Pfc. Albert Z. Sutton, of Chicago, a mild-mannered troop clerk asked for line duty to be near a buddy. When another friend was shot down right before his eyes, Sutton went berserk, grabbed a grease gun and went from pillbox to pillbox blasting (enemy soldiers). He ignored a Namboo machine gun which was firing at him at point blank range, killed the gunner, and accounted for four more . . . arriving at his objective unscathed, but pale and shaken by the experience.”

“Mild-mannered?’’ Wasn’t that the phrase they used to describe Clark Kent before he turned into Superman? What was my father, a fastidious, manicured man, doing with a grease gun? And wasn’t a pillbox the kind of hat Jackie Kennedy wore? So many questions, but the biggest: What did berserk mean? The dictionary’s answer was breathtaking: “a legendary warrior, whose frenzy in battle transformed him into a bear or a wolf who howled and foamed at the mouth.’’

How could this be: The man I remember seated in his armchair, reading the Saturday Review, listening to Tosca, smoking his pipe, once leaped about shooting men, howling, in a frenzy?

That would never happen to me. In 1968, 23 years after Dad returned from the war, an Army doctor ordered me to remove my glasses and read the letters on a wall chart. I tried my best, sort of, and made it to the fourth line down. The doctor stepped up and drew the letter X with blue chalk on my bare chest.

Safe from Vietnam, I told myself that if I, like Dad, had been called up in 1942, despite my astigmatism, I would have found a way to fight. How could I have faced my family, my friends, myself if I had not? After all, Hitler.

But life was different in the mid-1960s. Instead, I protested Selma, took LSD, spent a weekend in a commune. How could that ever have compared to what my father had endured, or at least what I imagined he had endured, since he would never talk about the war, not even after we watched “Platoon’’ at the Harvard Square cinema.

Dad ended up not on a hill in Burma but at a hospice in Ohio. His khaki bag disappeared somewhere in Columbus. But I have his watch, some cufflinks and handkerchiefs, a few books and letters, his golf cap.

And the knife. It must be from the war. Ten inches long, blunt now, but certainly not then, in a canvas sheath. It lies under the socks in my own dresser drawer. Last week, though, I returned it to the attic. My 5-year-old grandson, Carlos, was spending the night.

I listened to him as he played with Legos, waging “Star Wars’’ of his own, and wondered whether I would be alive when he was old enough to understand the story of his great-grandfather. He was off in space now, blasting imaginary enemies and spinning extraordinary stories. Humming and singing, one narrative emerging only to be upstaged by the next. Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader. Good guys and bad. Heroes and villains. The same old story.

Someday I will show Carlos the newspaper article about Dad and we can wonder together what it is that makes a hero? Someday I will give him the knife. Someday I can imagine his asking, “Did great-grandpa kill someone with this? Is it real?’’

Ted Sutton is an educational therapist in Cambridge.