Memorial Day is for remembering our war dead, as we do in The News & Observer today and Monday.

A few years ago, a holiday visit with my parents taught me a bit about my own father's service and his effort to help keep his generation's wars, and their history, from being forgotten.

I was visiting my folks in California and went with them to an open house at Castle Air Museum, where my dad volunteers, to see its dozens of old war planes.

He sent me ahead into the B-24 Liberator, climbed the ladder behind me and showed me the cockpit he had helped rebuild.

Charles D. Sill, from Scottsbluff, Neb., joined the Air Force at 17. During World War II he was the radar operator on B-24s and other bombers on missions over Germany and France. He trained as a pilot and flew long-haul flights over the Pacific during the Korean War, handling other missions and planes along the way.

I have a snapshot of him in his flight suit, all of 19, grinning as he perched on an unexploded bomb stored at his base in England. The framed photo sits beside the sepia-toned print of my granddad in his World War I Army uniform.

I never saw these pictures when I was a child. Dad never told war stories around the dinner table ­-- not because he wanted to hide them, he says, but just because he didn't see any reason for it.

"We went and did the job, and that was that," he said recently.

On that Memorial Day, the air museum near Atwater was crowded with families who had come to see the B-29 bomber, the F-14 and F-15 fighters, the behemoths and the refuelers with names like Flying Fortress and Invader and Bolo.

While the visitors marvel over the planes, Dad worries that they view them as relics and know little about larger stories the war birds can tell.

Dad and many other volunteers at the museum are in their 70s and 80s. They've raised money and poured thousands of hours into readying the retired, sometimes rusty aircraft for display.

He doesn't know whether younger veterans will be interested or knowledgeable enough to sustain the effort. The old planes are expensive to move and fix. And he has a greater worry: Will people forget not just how these wars were fought, but why?

I think about Dad in my work. He and I both love history, though he knows more.

Newspapers such as The N&O provide the first draft of history on many issues. We also get to fill out these stories over time, offering not just news but a sense of its significance.

We aim to do this in our stories about troops killed in the Gulf wars and in our reporting on our wars' politics, policy and impact.

This is our part in remembering. We honor people who died, like those on Page 1 today, and veterans who didn't, like my dad, by working to understand not just how they served, but why we needed them.