Baseball season reminds me of my dad’s time in Vietnam

News Snapshot:

At the wake for my dad, Mike Cassata, in 2011, my siblings and I displayed clippings of him from the military newspaper, Stars and Stripes. The stories were from the summer of 1966, a time when he played on the U.S. Army Japan Ramblers baseball team, after being drafted in 1965 at 21 years old. From a young age, I knew my dad was stationed at a hospital near Tokyo, where he cared for soldiers injured in Vietnam. However, he didn’t share much detail about his experience, except that he felt lucky he didn’t have to engage in combat yet...