Free Tell My Sons: A Father's Last Letters by Lt Col Mark Weber, Robin Williams

quit.
    I put on my best Aussie accent and offered a lesson with a little humor and grace: losing didn’t need to be shameful, but quitting would be, and it wasn’t going to happen as long as I was at the table. “Ya gonna have to play through, mate, that’s the only option!”
    This all resulted in cackles from Matthew and Joshua, but only scornful looks from you, Noah. I recognize this may seem like cruel teasing, but the lesson was sound. And it is a testament of sorts that many months later, all of you recalled the details of the interaction with clarity and pleasure.
    Playing Risk made me realize how I am both like and unlike my own father.
    Like my dad: The my-way-or-the-highway nature of the enterprise, the demand that Noah finish the game, the not knowing—and ultimately, not caring—if you enjoyed the game.
    Unlike my dad: The decision to take the time to do it all in the first place, the playful theatrics, the humor, the cultural curiosity, and the willingness to help an immature mind process emotions in a mature way.
    *   *   *
    A different father-son experience provides a more intense illustration of the question regarding familiarity. When we returned to Minnesota and experienced our first real winter, my mind wandered back to my childhood. I remembered seeing huge, carved-out snow forts big enough to walk into—projects that required a dad’s help. I didn’t regret that my dad didn’t do this with us, but I wanted to do it with you.
    Snowfall is tricky. You can get thirty inches a year, but if theweather isn’t cold enough, or it all doesn’t fall at the same time, it’s difficult to build a snow fort of any decent size.
    In December 2009, we hit the jackpot—the fifth-largest snowstorm on record in Minnesota, with seventeen inches of snow in one day. Within a week, we got another sixteen inches on top of that. And the timing was perfect—Christmas school break.
    I gathered you together as if we were planning the D-Day invasion. “Boys, this is it. This kind of snow comes along once in a kid’s lifetime.” In fact, a search of Minnesota records revealed only two times in my life when this much snow fell in one day or one month, and one of those times was in December 1982, when I was just one year older than both of you, Joshua and Noah.
    Your eyes burned with excitement at the time. But I was not naïve. I knew it would not be easy to keep you motivated as the work got harder.
    It took me two days to gather the snow from our driveway and our neighbor’s. At one point, the snow became too tightly packed to move by snowblower, so I used a wheelbarrow. The pile stood eight feet high, fifteen feet wide, and fifteen feet long—enough snow to bury two full-size SUVs.
    The digging began at 7:00 a.m. the next morning with a sleepy crew. Matthew, you developed an ingenious digging technique that produced dense blocks of snow, which we used to build a six-foot-high corridor around half the fort and a brick-like castle façade.
    The temperature was below zero, which was great for building, but not for nine-year-olds’ morale.
    By the end of day three, the sight was impressive enough to stop traffic in the street. But the chill and the workload had sapped the spirit of my once gung ho little troopers.
    By day four, it felt as if I were running a Russian gulag. “Come on, boys. We said we were going to do this. I told you it was going to be tough. But it will be worth it!” At fourteen, Matthew,you were my biggest supporter, but even you began to question the wisdom of the project. It was eating away your Christmas break, too.
    I spent many hours of those next few days working alone.
    When the snow fort was complete, it was a neighborhood spectacle. Kids and adults stopped by and asked for tours of the “two-bedroom bungalow” with two entrances. You all enjoyed a week of celebrity before it was time to return to school.
    Days later, we got a call from KARE-11, our local NBC news station, asking