In the weeks that followed, I asked questions. I begged for answers, for details, for anything that might make sense of the void he had left behind. But every door I knocked on was gently but firmly slammed shut. Papers I requested mysteriously vanished from archives. Voices on the phone would lower to a murmur before promising to call back, a call that never came. Eventually, all I was left with was a crisply folded flag on my kitchen table and a silence so profound it felt like its own form of violence. I came to a bitter, soul-crushing realization: the man I loved, Captain Daniel Pratt, had been erased from the official record as if he never mattered.