He won the Silver Star. The Marine Corps citation read, "Upon seeing two of his men stranded on the opposite bank of the Matanikau River, and unable to withdraw due to their wounds, Second Lieutenant Moore, at great risk to his life, unhesitatingly swam across the river, continually swept by heavy Japanese machine- gun fire, and, with the help of his sergeant, brought the two men back to safety." For a later battle, he won the Purple Heart and the Navy Cross: "Although critically wounded...and lying prostrate and helpless, he continued to encourage his men to keep attacking until he lost consciousness."

"I won the medals for the whole platoon," my father told a reporter after he got home in April 1943. Nothing had prepared him for combat. "On the third day, I was sitting in the midst of my platoon, in position defending the command post, when a sniper ran across the field below. We opened fire. It seemed like shooting clay pigeons." The man fell, and when they reached the body they found photographs of his children in his jacket. "My hands aren't bloodless," my father wrote.

After fighting on Tulagi, his platoon was transported to Guadalcanal, where he himself was wounded. He remembered wad-ing and mucking, bullets splashing "like rain," grenades "swishing" overhead, the platoon getting smaller as boys were killed. When he heard a low gurgle of blood, he realized that he had been hit. "They said if the jeep hadn't been there, I'd have bled to death." After the first days, he felt no pain, but he had a constant fever, and a nightmare that woke him, screaming, every night: Tojo's Imperial Army making a frontal attack on his hospital bed.

Posted to Seattle the year after he was wounded, my father began, in memory, to observe himself as he had been the spring he came homehis disconsolate staggering and meandering, those evenings out drinking martinis and smoking cigarettes, the arch, funny chatter fading when across the room he saw a marine in uniform standing at the bar. He'd go over to him, simply to shoot the breeze, maybe buy him a drink, and feel, he wrote, "closer to the stranger than to my own family." He began to wonder why he had been spared, why on earth the bullet had come so close to his heart and his spine without killing him.

As a returning hero, he was called upon to give speeches for the war-bond campaign, in which he told, in an upbeat way, the story of his platoon and cheered on the war effort. "Out there," he would say, "we used to promise each other that any of us who got back would tell the people here what war in the Pacific is like, how tough it is. We thought that if people really knew what it's like, that would hurry production so that our job could be finished and the boys could come home."

But the story my father really wanted to tell did not fit the propaganda offensive, and so, when he was approached by a church journal to write anonymously about a marine going to war, he quickly agreed.

"Perhaps you have noticed the break that comes in a soldier's voice in the middle of a story," he wrote, "how his eyes turn away, or how his breath comes deep for a moment. Once in a great while his eyes fill and his lower lip quivers! He may leave the room, or break a match hard with his fingers. He has seen the face or heard the voice of the dead in that moment." Because he wrote anonymously, he was able to write of the "violent shame" that came over him in battle, but also to acknowledge that when "on a dark beach he heard that his closest friend had been killed trying to rescue another man...a burning anger was his only reaction...and a desire to fight."

Before killing and before being wounded, my father had easily described Japanese enemy soldiers to his five-year-old nephew as "monkeys without tails," or to his sister as "yellow swine," but now he recalled a "pathetic little Japanese boy curled up by the side of a trail with beardless cheeks and small feet." My father was coming into the compassion that, years later, would mark his power as a preacher. Reading the wartime pamphlet, I can hear his voice, his fist pounding the pulpit. Now "the boy was learning," he wrote then. "He was growing hard to the sights and the feelings of war, but he was growing deeper...."

My father, Bishop Paul Moore (1919-2003), fought as a marine in the Solomon Islands during the summer and fall of 1942. Like many veterans, he rarely spoke of his war experience, but while researching a book about my relationship with him I found letters he wrote at the time that give a vivid sense of a twenty-two-year-old's experience of battle.

Honor Moore is the author of Red Shoes, Darling and Memoir, three volumes of poems. She has adapted this piece from The Bishop's Daughter, her memoir of her relationship with her father, to be published in May by W. W. Norton.

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