When he came home, Rhodey thinks, there'd been no one to keep secrets from any kids. Sometimes he regrets it, but, he'd made his own family. Sometimes it was an older Navajo woman meeting him at the airport...sometimes it was a black stretch limousine stocked with his favorite scotch.

Frank's story makes him smile as much, but there's a melancholy twist to it. "I had a buddy in the air force, probably before you even met your Maria, and he'd say something almost the same," he says. "That it made it worth it."