DW's Blog

What’s In A Name

by DW Green — August 12, 2026

“On the Promise My Father Carried Home from the War.”

Letters of the Law

My legal first name is two letters. DW Plain and simple — only two letters, and yet three syllables, and a good deal easier to spell than to say.

Beginning in the second grade, I learned to come prepared. On the first day of every school year the teacher would run down the roll and arrive, without fail, at the same puzzled pause. “And what does DW stand for?” And I would reach into my pocket — no cool backpacks in those days; lunch pails yes,

backpacks no — and produce my birth certificate like a small lawyer entering evidence. “It is my name,”

I would say. I carried that certificate on the first day of school for eleven years. And after all that diligence, my high school diploma was printed with my father’s name instead of mine.

In 1968, when I registered for the draft, the United States Army decided two letters were not enough and added two more. My draft card read DW IO Green. The IO, it turned out, stood for “initials only.” My wallet was heavier after that, weighted down by two arbitrary letters the Army could not do without. Years

later, applying for my first passport with my birth certificate in hand, I watched a clerk go pale. “Never?” she said. “I have never seen a two-letter, initials-only name in my life. I will need a supervisor.” A modest delay, and the passport came through.

And then, for reasons no one has ever explained, I began receiving mail addressed to Darla Green.

Who on earth is Darla, I would wonder, dropping her mail in the wastebasket. I threw out Darla’s mail faithfully for more than a decade.

All my life, people have tried to make my name into something familiar. David. Donald. Daniel. Darla. They assume the two letters must stand for something.

It Stands for Someone

But here is the truth I was the last to learn. DW does not stand for anything. It stands for someone.

Someone my father loved enough to remember.

Delbert Wilbert

The letters, first of all, are my father’s own. His name was Delbert Wilbert Green. My grandmother Green had a fondness for the grand old names of the German cast, and she gave them to all three of her

children — Delbert Wilbert, and his sister Alvera, and his brother Roland. She considered Delbert Wilbert the most beautiful of the lot; my father, I can report, did not entirely share her enthusiasm for the

Wilbert. So when his own time came to name a son, he reached for the initials and left the rest — DW — and in doing so he was doing three things at once, though a child could only ever see the surface of it.

He was sparing me the weight of a name he himself had carried without joy. He was handing down his own two letters, so that I would carry him. And, deepest of all, he was giving me a name shaped like a promise — a name that was nothing but initials, because the man he had made the promise to had a

name that was nothing but initials too.

My name is a marriage of two men. My father’s letters, in another man’s form.

His name was JR. That is all I have, and all my father ever seemed to need.

My father was newly married and barely into his twenties when Pearl Harbor came and the nation went to war. He had registered with the local draft board in Weld County, at Greeley, and on the sixth of May, 1942, he was inducted and entered the Army at Fort Logan, Colorado. He was trained to the field artillery

and made a reconnaissance sergeant — a forward observer, which is a polite way of saying the man who goes out ahead of everyone, alone, past the enemy’s line, and calls the fire back over his own shoulder. Staff Sergeant Delbert W. Green, Battery C, Fifty-Eighth Armored Field Artillery Battalion. And from nearly the first day there was JR — a Texan, his closest friend in the service, a young man whose first name, like the one I would one day carry, was only a pair of initials.

They went through training together. They shipped out in November of 1942 and went into North Africa

together; my father would say for the rest of his life that Casablanca was the most beautiful city he ever saw. Tunisia. Then Sicily in the July of 1943, under Patton, and the furious race across that island to reach Messina ahead of the British in August. Then England, and the long preparation. They came ashore at

Omaha Beach in the summer of 1944, in the weeks after the landings, when the beach had been taken

and the whole weight of an army was still pouring across it into France. Northern France. The Rhineland. The Ardennes. Central Europe. Two initials watching each other’s backs across a war.

And then, in January of 1945, in the frozen chaos of the Battle of the Bulge, JR did not make it, and my father did.

The Pledge

My father knelt over the body of his friend, on a battlefield, in the cold, and made a pledge: if he lived to go home, he would name his next son the initials — a name in the shape of JR’s name — so that his friend would not vanish from the earth.

I know a little of what those years cost him, because the medals told a piece of what he rarely would.

There was a Purple Heart — and here my father’s humor survives even the war, because he came by it as a forward observer, out past the enemy’s line, shot squarely in the backside by a German sniper. He was a funny man, my dad, even when he was not trying to be, and he told that one on himself for the rest of his life. It is only now, holding his service record in my hands, that I can see the date beside the wound: the twentieth of December, 1944. Four days into the Battle of the Bulge. The joke he told at the dinner

table for forty years happened in the worst days of his life.

And there was a Bronze Star, for bravery, earned carrying a fallen soldier out from behind the enemy’s line through intense fire. Sit with that a moment. My father once carried a fallen man to safety under fire and was decorated for it — and the one man he most wanted to carry out, he could not. So he

carried him the only way left to him. He carried him home in a name.

The Star in My Hands

I held that star in my hands as a boy. I remember the weight of it, and I remember being prouder than I had words for.

For most of my life I carried it in memory as a Silver Star, and I believed it had been lost — misplaced somewhere in the long shuffle of family things. This summer my sister Barb turned up my father’s

service record, and there is no Silver Star in it. There is a Bronze Star, and a Purple Heart, and a Good Conduct Medal, and the campaign ribbons of a man who went from Tunisia to Central Europe. So the

star I held was the Bronze Star. And here is the thing that made me laugh and then made me quiet: the Bronze Star Medal is, quite literally, a star. Five points, bronze, on a red and blue ribbon, sitting in a small boy’s palm. I had the shape of it exactly right for sixty-five years. Only the word drifted.

I have thought a good deal about that drift, and I have decided it is the truest part of the story. A boy does not remember the paperwork. He remembers the weight in his hand and the size of his father.

Over sixty-five years the official word wore away and what stayed was the star, and the pride, and the man — which is precisely the order of importance. The medal was only ever the visible proof of something invisible. Paper burns, ribbons fade, mementos wander off in the shuffle of families, and

every solid thing eventually leaves the hand. But the valor did not leave. And the name did not leave.

That is the whole lesson of my life in one sentence: the visible thing slips, and the invisible thing stays — carried not in a drawer but in a living man who answers to two letters.

My Buddy Bill

So when my old buddy Bill Shakespeare took up this very question — what is in a name? — he had his

Juliet answer it: a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. Bill was making the case that a name matters less than the essence of the thing. And a rose, I will grant him, is a rose whatever you call it.

For most of my life I would have agreed with Bill.

Then I began to understand my own name, and I had to part ways with him. Because Bill thought there was not much in a name. My father would have disagreed, and my father had stood in places Bill never did. A rose may not need its name. But a man — a young Texan, dead at the Bulge, with no grave any of us ever visited — a man is remembered by his name, or he is lost. Juliet had the luxury of philosophy. My

father had a body in the snow and a promise to make. He did not conclude that names do not matter. He bet the rest of his life that they are among the few things that outlast us.

Bringing the Name Home

For seventy-five years I have answered to the name DW Every single time someone has spoken it —

every teacher, every roll call, every friend calling me in to dinner — they have unknowingly remembered a young soldier who never came home. I have spent my whole life carrying a promise that was made

before I was born.

Roughly two and a half of every hundred Americans who served in that war did not come back. JR was one of them, one among four hundred thousand. But he was the one whose friend refused to let the

number swallow him — the one whose friend carried his name home to Denver, Colorado, in November of 1950. I am what my father brought home. I am the name.

And I will let you in on the last small joke of it, the one that makes me smile every time, because my father would have wanted the smile left in. Of all twenty-six letters, the W is the only one whose own

name takes three syllables to say — double-you. So my two-letter name takes longer to pronounce than to spell; it makes a person work a little to say it. I used to think that was a nuisance. I have come to

believe it is exactly right. Remembering is supposed to take a little work. A few of my friends have given up and simply call me Deedub, and that is fine — because every version of it, every stumble over the