In the early morning chill at Arlington National Cemetery, the final resting-place of thousands of brave and loyal military men and women, the marble headstones seemed to stand at attention. All had small, American flags fluttering in the spring air, but only two had fresh flowers placed at their bases.
Facing two adjacent gravesites stood a lone, uniformed figure. The gentle breeze blew the silver hair under the Green Beret that topped his bowed head. Red roses covered the base of the stone whose inscription read, along with the standard information, "Captain Jennifer Ann Smith -US Army WWII Korea Nurse, Mother, Angel ." The other, with a single, white carnation at its base, only read, "Colonel David Alan Smith - US Army WWII, Korea Medal of Honor, 1943 Father, Friend, and Hero." Both stones had a date of death of 1952.
Lieutenant Colonel John "Hannibal" Smith stood silently before the graves of his parents pondering the fates that had led him to this point in his life. It was early April, and he just escaped from the maximum-security prison at Fort Bragg, so with no other family, he was alone, save for the two other men he escaped with, and on the run from the United States Army for a crime, he was only guilty of by following the orders of his superior officer. So, Hannibal stood there in the early morning sunlight thinking back to the past, wondering what might have been if he had done things just a little differently or fate worked in his favor.
Hannibal remembered the first time that he met the Smiths. He was a four-year-old, scared little boy who had just lost his mother in a car accident and really didn't know much about his father at that point, except that his mother had told him that he was a very bad man. The Smiths took him in as their foster child and less than two months later, adopted him since they could not bare to part with the little boy who had become so much a part of them and their lives. He remembered walking into their house on the base and looking up into the caring brown eyes of David Smith that first night, knowing he was home and Jennifer Smith had him calling her mom on that very first night, so those two people became the whole world to him. He thought back to WWII and how afraid he was that his dad would not return from the war and remembered how he and his mother sat listening to the radio for hours, afraid of what might be happening to him in the South Pacific. Captain David Smith came home from that one, but the fates dictated that he was not to come back from the next one.
Proud of his father and his service to the country, Hannibal applied to West Point when he was old enough, and once he received word of his appointment, his dad puffed up like a proud peacock for a good solid week, telling everybody under his command that his son was going to the Point. Hannibal remembered those days fondly wondering if his dad or mother would ever come back down to earth. He had loved them so very much and missed them dearly.
When they were both killed in the Korean War, he felt that the ache in his heart would never end and he was there in Korea when his dad died and saw how it happened. Wanting to salute his dad for the first time as an officer of the United States Army, Hannibal received permission from his CO, but the North Koreans attacked the small outpost just after his arrival. As he jumped out of his jeep during the attack, Hannibal saw his father running around giving orders to his men and saw the North Korean soldier aiming for his father, but lost sight of him in the smoke of the battle. So, during the ensuing struggle for that small patch of dirt, Hannibal was wounded after taking over a platoon whose lieutenant had died and continued in the family tradition of never giving up by fighting until the attack was repressed and passed out where he stood from blood loss and the shock of his wounds setting in.
After losing sight of his father and passing out from his wounds, Hannibal didn't know his father died during the battle; it was only after he awoke after surgery in the post-op unit of the local MASH that the unit chaplain informed him about his father's death. The same officer also told him that his father's CO left word about the young lieutenant being awarded the bronze star for his courageous actions during the battle, not that Hannibal had really cared about that, he would much rather have his father instead of a stupid hunk of tin.
The news of his father dying in the battle hit him like an anvil, so much so that the doctors sedated him for the rest of the day. Just to add insult to injury, a couple of days later his mother was rushing to his side after learning about his severe injuries from an army chaplain and her jeep hit a landmine buried in the roadway a few miles outside of Seoul, killing her and her driver instantly. She never learned about her husband's death due to the different service branches, and Hannibal often wondered how he got through those first few months after their deaths. But he had to think of survival in the middle of that damned war and not of the past, so Hannibal wasn't able to put their deaths behind him until after he returned to the states a year later and visited their graves for the first time.
After he got back from Korea, he remembered looking into who his birth father was. It was then that he learned what his real mother had meant by a real bad man because he was just that. Bad. Dangerous. A cold-blooded killer. He was the head of one of the most prominent crime families in the Chicago mob at the time Hannibal was born. Don Gianni Giacovazzo. A godfather. And since Gianni was Italian for John, he figured that was his real name, and his mother changed it. Hannibal knew at that point he never wanted to meet him and how right his mother was when she escaped from his clutches carrying her son in a basket while she made her way through the snowy drifts of Chicago to a Catholic church nearby. If Hannibal had stayed in his care, he would have become just like him, and he shuddered even thinking about that.
It was this past that Hannibal never mentioned to anyone, not even his closest friends since it was something he wanted no part of and kept locked away, hidden from everyone, his friends, the Army and even himself. And this above all else was the reasons why he hated organized crime so much. Their killings of everyone around one of the opposing families, even innocent children, for no outright reason, other than pure greed, rubbed him the wrong way. To him, they had no sense of duty or honor at all, and those were things that he prided the most in his life because of his father and his tremendous sense of duty and honor.
As he stood between the tombstones, Hannibal remembered the good times with his parents, the days they watched him play baseball in little league, the time spent at the beach on vacation, his mother fixing him a Halloween costume and sitting around on warm summer evenings listening to the radio enjoying each others company. And Hannibal fondly thought about when he fell out of a tree when he was eight years old and broke his arm and how his mother fussed over him with his arm in a cast. Boy, was she protective of me, he thought, but that was her love showing through to someone who really needed it.
And one of his most fond memories was the first time that his father had called him Hannibal, he was ten years old and had come home from school that day babbling on and on about what they had just covered in history class. The class had recreated on paper one of the major battles of the Civil War, and he told his father about what he would have done, had he been in command of the Confederate Army. So for the rest evening, Hannibal talked how the course of the war would have changed if they had maneuvered the troops a little differently, even taking out a large sheet of construction paper and drawing out the battle how he would have commanded it. Of course, his father listened to his son intently and saw the tactical genius in him starting to peek through, so from that day forward, his father started calling him Hannibal after the famous general from Carthage, who defeated the Romans at Cannae in southeastern Italy in 216 B.C. with a much smaller army. The name stuck, and when his father died ten years later during the Korean War, he continued to go by the name in memory of him.
Hannibal looked up from his thoughts as the sun glinted off the rows of colorful ribbons on the left side of his dress uniform. If anybody had been looking, they would have noticed the light blue ribbon with five white stars on it in the shape of an M on the top row, indicating the Medal of Honor, and the name tag on his uniform was the same last name on the two markers in front of him.
Two Medals of Honor in the same family was an unusual occurrence, but there was no one around to notice. He was still alone and glad, in a way since his father had not lived to see that mess that he was in right now. But he knew that no matter what anybody said, his father would have believed him, supported him through it all and fought for him. So as he stood looking at his father's marker, Hannibal thought that if his father was still alive, he might try to ride this thing out through the channels of the Army, with his dad's support. But, since he wasn't, he didn't have that option to fall back on.
Once the sun started waning towards the west, Hannibal thought that he had better leave before someone recognized him and turned him into the Army since he didn't want to leave this place in that way. But he didn't know when he would be able to come back again, either. So, before turning away from the headstones, Hannibal came to full, rigid and perfect military attention and as he stood there, gave a textbook perfect military salute to his parents, and then turned on his heel and walked away.