I come from a family of fighting men. My cousin Adolph was a paratrooper who landed at Normandy on D-Day, and the parachute he used — stained with blood and dirt — was turned into my cousin Helen’s wedding dress. My father spent two years in Thule Greenland, at a godforsaken outpost at the North Pole during (no pun intended) the Cold War. My uncle Louie was a Marine, stationed in Beirut during o…