Last week, when Islamic militants executed a series of attacks throughout Paris, I thought of a picture I have in my house. It is an old sepia-toned picture of the Eiffel Tower that my uncle took after helping liberate that city from the Nazis in late August of 1944. The picture is beautiful, the tower standing out amid a mix of fog and an eerie, spectral light. Looking at that picture gives me hope that our nation and our world can once again defeat a growing evil. My uncle Raymond was a soldier. I know very little about his time serving this country in our Armed Forces. He didn't talk about it much, not to my father and certainly not to the little kid I was when I knew him. I think he stormed the beaches at Normandy. I know he was shot and wounded in battle. I remember a picture of him standing at the end of a dock on a lake in some foreign country, mountains in the background, wearing a cleanly pressed uniform and leaning on a cane. In that picture he looks like th