Dad in Uniform (Digitally modified snapshot)

On Veteran's Day, I usually post a war-time photo of my dad. The image I am posting today began with a snapshot that I found yesterday among his photos, sent to me a few years ago.  Sometimes these old pictures present a mystery about where he was during the war or what he was doing.* In this case, nothing was written on the back, no clues, no date, and only a bit of mystery. From other of army photos, I already know his unit spent camped out near a forest. But I liked the simple picture of my father in uniform, and decided to go with that.  The only mystery was why I hadn't seen this picture before.  Today I scanned the snapshot into my computer, and used iPhoto to do some basic retouching.  That's when I noticed that it looked like one of his front teeth was missing. Aha! So that's why I hadn't seen the photo before! (I had heard that he had lost a front tooth during the war.  The family story is he was drunk and when he was spoken to by the MPs, he refused to reveal his name, rank, and serial number, and got punched in the mouth.)  Well, okay. But I could fix the tooth. I decided to open the image in Painter and I replaced the missing tooth with a little digital dentistry.  I also noticed that you could see the shoulder of another person standing next to him, so I decided to crop that out, and the result was a better composition.  The photo was pretty grainy, so I added both woodcut and posterizing effects to get this image.  I will continue my efforts to solve mysteries, big and small, about my dad's time in the army.  But really, the details don't matter. He was an ordinary guy, and as he told me years later, he was scared, though you can't tell from looking at him here. No big dramatic tales to tell. Like a lot of other people, he did his bit against the Nazis. But knowing that he did his part to fight tyranny, even though he had a lot to loose, even though he had to leave his brand new wife to do it, even though he was afraid: that's the main story.  That's what I have been thinking about more and more. I try to remember his example of ordinary courage when the news of the day makes me worry about two-bit tyrants and creeping antisemitism. 

 *(For example, yesterday I was intrigued by 

a different photo of my dad with army buddies in front of a building, and on the back he had written "École Professionale," somewhere near Cherbourg, I assume. No time to track that down today, so I will leave that for another time.)