Letter from Chief Dave to Lt. Rorke's son.

Before my father died, he said the worst thing about growing old was that other men stop seeing you as dangerous.

I’ve always remembered that – how being dangerous was sacred, a badge of honor. You live your life by a code, an ethos. Every man does. It’s your shoreline. It’s what guides you home, and trust me, you’re always trying to get home.

Your father was a reader – Churchill, of course, but also Faulkner and books about Tecumseh.

He loved artists who painted people with bodies that looked like boxes. I’d give him hell about that.

He just say you gotta look harder. “Look harder,” your father would say. I always knew he wasn’t just talking about those boxy abstract paintings.

There’s threats everywhere in a world that’s draped in camouflage.

Your father’s grandfather gave up his life flying a B-24 in World War 2.

He kept the Liberator aloft just long enough for everyone to jump and then he went down with the plane. That’s the blood coursing in your veins…

Your father was a good man. Growing up without him is going be hard. It’s going to hurt. You’ll feel alone, out to sea with no shore in sight. You’ll wonder “Why me?” “Why him?” Remember, you have warrior’s blood in your veins.

The code that made your father who he was is the same code that’ll make you a man he would admire, respect. Put your pain in a box. Lock it down.

Like those people in the paintings your father liked, we are men made up of boxes: chambers of loss, triumph, of hurt and hope and love.

No one is stronger or more dangerous than a man who can harness his emotions, his past. Use it as fuel, as ammunition, as ink to write the most important letter of your life.

Before your father died he asked me to give you this poem by Tecumseh. I told him I’d fold it into a paper airplane, and in a way I guess that’s what I’m doing – sailing it from him to you.