I stood behind my five children with my throat closed, and when they had finished I stepped forward and did the only thing I knew how to do for a man like Ames Lockridge, which was to bring my hand to the brim of my cover and hold him a slow salute — one soldier to another kind of soldier, the kind who does the quiet right thing when no one is watching and expects no medal for it.

Then I lowered my hand, and I gathered my children, and I turned us toward the car.

I have rendered a great many salutes in my career, to flags and to officers and to the folded flags handed across caskets to widows who could not stop shaking.

I meant that one more than most of them.

Because it seems to me that we hand out our honors, as a society, so badly — that we reserve them for the loud kinds of courage, the charges and the medals and the names on the buildings, and overlook almost entirely the quiet kind that is actually rarer and harder, the courage of an old man in a hard family who spends the last two years of his life quietly setting right a wrong he was too weak to prevent, and asks for no credit, and dies before he can be thanked.

Ames Lockridge never wore a uniform.