But I want to stop on the medals for a moment, because of everything they did, that is the one that tells you who they were.

The money, I could almost understand — money is abstract, and greed is an old, ordinary sin.

But the medals were not abstract.

Walt had earned each of those over twenty-two years, in places he never talked about, at costs I could only guess at from the way he went quiet on certain days in certain weeks of the year.

That shadow box was not decoration to him.

It was the physical record of the hardest and most meaningful thing he had ever done, the proof that his life had contained honor, kept where he could see it from his bed.