This article originally appeared in The Detroit News July 1, 2024.

Mike Pancio joined the U.S. Army seven months after the attack on Pearl Harbor. He was 25.

He trained at Fort Bragg in North Carolina and was an artillery instructor at Camp Van Dorn in Mississippi. He was promoted to the rank of technical sergeant. In September 1944, he boarded a ship overseas, attached to the 393rd Infantry Regiment.

Mike saw immediate action in Europe. He participated in the clearing of the Hürtgen Forest and the Remagen Bridgehead. His regiment played a critical role in the Battle of the Bulge, earning him a Combat Infantryman Badge for active ground combat.

After the war, Mike returned home to Olean, a small town along the Allegheny River in western New York. His parents were immigrants from what is now Poland. He joined his father at the family’s neighborhood grocery store. Locals still remember buying penny candy there as children. Mike operated several carousels and owned gum ball machines across New York and Pennsylvania, which he filled every week.

Mike met and married Stella, a woman who fled Ukraine during the war. They built a home just down the block from the grocery store, where they raised four daughters.

Mike and Stella enjoyed a close community with dozens of family members in town. They attended the church Mike’s father and uncles built, less than a quarter mile from the house. They helped run the church’s annual festival, which featured Stella’s pierogi, nut rolls and other food from the “old country.” Mike was active in local civic groups like the American Legion and the YMCA.

He continued to run the grocery store with his brother, working there nearly 30 years until retirement. He lived in the house he and Stella built until he passed away in 1996.

Mike Pancio was my grandfather.

Grandpa did not talk much about his time in the war. I suspect his reticence was a combination of the Greatest Generation’s modesty and his own personality. What little information we have is cobbled together from old newspaper stories, subsequent research and a few photographs. I have a snapshot of him grinning as he perched on the wing of a shot-up Luftwaffe airplane.

As we approach the Fourth of July, it is worth asking what we love about this country. What we want to preserve and what should be built. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher explained what she thought made America unique. “No other nation has been built upon an idea — the idea of liberty,” she said.

Ideas are more than theories. Ideas come to life in the decisions people make, the families they raise and the communities they build.

Which is why I thought of my grandfather. He was not famous or larger than life. His name will not appear in the history books. But his life stood for something we still find worthwhile and inspiring.

Mike Pancio’s quiet life represented the idea of America. He lived out the values of duty, hard work, family, community and love of country.

That’s what I’ll celebrate this year.

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