Our daughter wanted a dog. She begged for one. She wheedled, and cornered me for one. She used all the advantages a ten-year-old child has, like a good memory and a cherubic face.
    “You had a dog,” she complained with her arms calmly placed behind her back, “when you where a kid.” 
    She maintained a composed demeanor, eyeing me. I like composed. I said nothing.
    “I’m an only child,” she continued, not in a whining tone, butmatter of factly. “I’ll never have brothers or sisters. I’m just lonely sometimes.”
    I continued to say nothing, but I thought. You are right; you will not have brothers or sisters. Your mother

and I are too old. We have many regrets and your sharpened dart has struck one of them, bull’s-eye!
    “Don’t you have pictures of your dog?” she asked, with a sigh and a bit of hope, “Could you show them to me?”
    Awell laid trap, if ever I heard one. And I put my foot into it like a bear beneath a bee’s hive dripping with ambered honey.
 

    For whatever reason, my mother bequeathed me a box of photos when I was ten. Ancient, decrepit, mostly out-of-focus, black-and-white images, long forgotten until I was pestered about the need for a dog. Buried in the attic, entombed in a footlocker, they were easy to find as I had kept them in the same pink and blue Johnson and Johnson cardboard box I had received them in. 
    I pawed and perused photo after photo, not bothering to leave the attic. I found a picture or two of Biff, my Cocker Spaniel. She had been a good dog, and as black in color as fate. The family mug shots twanged primordial chords and I found myself sighing much like my daughter had a few hours ago. I dug deeper, to the bottom of the box. I hadn’t seen these photos in forty years or more. 
    I pulled out five two-by-two inch, glossyblack and whites. I knew what they were straightaway. Back when I was ten, they meant nothing. Now these same photos almost made me cry. They had been so exotic I had kept them, but now they were the stuff of the blood in my daughter’s veins.
    Irony by the bomb load.
    I absorbed the photos, rapt in details that I now understood. Unbelievable. All five photos were circa the forgotten Korean War. My mother had dated a U.S. soldier before I was born; I think his name was Jack. That surprised me that I could even recall his name. In one photo, he stood in front of asix-foot high stack of sandbags. Canvas tents stretched behind him. Even as a ten-year-old I had known what he clutched in his hands – a sinister looking Chinese-made barrel-clip machine gun. He pretended to strum it like a guitar. A big smile accompanied the playful gesture.
    In anotherphoto three young gaudily made up Korean women posed. They too smiled, but now years later I could see their smiles were required. Maybe even paid for. I remember thinking they were beautiful when I was a kid. Now, I knew they were tough-as-nails camp follower- survivors. Yet, the photo that humbled and disturbed me the most was one showing rows of bombs, stacked three deep. The rows piled on and on into the distance. They’d be considered primitive by today’s high tech weapons standards, these were merely run-of-the-mill one-hundred-pound contact gravity bombs with cheap fins attached to the end. The bombs had words written on them in chalk, “Serprise package from Skippy.” Serprise spelled incorrectly is on the first bomb on the top row. Package from on the first bomb in the second row and Skippy sits on the last bomb in the bottom row. They wait, heaped, conveyor belt style, ready to kill in this Skippy’s name.
    A sadness tugged at me. I wanted to cry. Amber’s mom is 100% Korean. 
    In far-off, alien Korea during 1950-1953, the villagers and city-dwellers of the Korean peninsula were bombed; bombed to smithereens with all kinds of weapons. Some weapons had names chalked on them. General estimates were that one million people died in the Korean War. Maybe members of my wife’s family died from these very bombs autographed, “Serprise package from Skippy.” 
    And a horrible epiphany followed by a blood rush to my head gave me clarity that I didn’t want. Only a few years ago I learned something from an aunt. My mother’s teenage nickname was Skippy. She didn’t like the nickname and changed it after marrying my father.
    The photo was a present to her from her Armyboy friend Jack and the bombs with her name chalked on them, a present to the Koreans below. In the end, they had become a present to me a ten year-old boy, who in his fifties became horrified at the connections.
    Full circle -Serprise package from Skippy.
    Our ten-year-old daughter got the dog.