“This brought all that back up: the anguish and turmoil from back then,” he said. Now, Miller learned, there was likely a reason his father died - a reason that had long been kept from him by order of the United States government. “As soon as I made the connection that this might have had something to do with his young death,” Miller said. Miller.Īt first, said Tim Miller, his response was simple wonder. Bikini Atoll 1946.”īelow that was his father’s name: Harold J. “Operation Crossroads,” the certificate read in folksy tiki font above a cartoon drawing of an exploding ship. A snapshot of his father during the war, the only one Miller still has from those days, shoulder to shoulder with an old Navy buddy.Īnd then, framed and placed under glass - with little wooden handles on each side like a harmless tea tray - was a certificate that blew open Miller’s understanding of how his father came to die so young, of a painful stomach cancer that spread to his lungs.
A black-and-white photo of an unknown indigenous woman, from a faraway tropical island.
Inside the box was his dad’s old sailor cap from World War II. Whether any of them actually examined its contents, said a now-grizzle-bearded Miller, age 67 and sitting at his home just outside Rochester - looking out over autumn leaves to the waters of the Irondequoit Bay - he still doesn’t know.
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