Some years back, I met a man at an emergency shelter who fought on Omaha Beach during the D-Day invasion, faced a Panzer in the snowy forests outside Bastogne on Christmas and barely escaped execution as a prisoner during the Battle of the Bulge.

Like so many World War II veterans, he told me his war stories reluctantly. In his view, he was just doing his job as best he could, hoping to defeat the Nazis as quickly as possible so he could return home to America.

I told him most people would consider him a hero. He just laughed.

Then he got serious and told me if I wanted to write a story about him that meant something, I wouldn’t pay attention to what happened in battle a long time ago.

He wouldn’t give me his name because, he said, it’s only his story that mattered.

What he wanted me to tell readers about — which I’ve never had a chance to do until now — was something that wounded him far more deeply than combat: his experience in the classroom during the Great Depression.

With tears in his eyes, he told me that his school in tiny Terryville, Connecticut, didn’t offer any sort of breakfast or lunch for students.

All he ate at school each day was a single Graham cracker. He didn’t get much more at home; he felt hungry all of the time.

He said he was also often sick, no doubt in part because of his hunger, but also because his family could not afford to take him to a doctor.

His teachers called him a dunce, he said, but the only thing wrong with him was that he was hungry and sick. He had to repeat each grade because he could never keep up.

In the end, he dropped out, seemingly destined to fail in everything.

Pearl Harbor changed all that, he told me, because the Army fed him well and provided medical care. The experience taught him how to be a soldier, and a lot more.

He was just like everyone else in his unit. He wasn’t a hungry, sick dunce anymore. He was an infantryman trusted to help win a war that had to be fought.

When he eventually returned to the United States after the Nazis surrendered, he got an education, even a college degree, and had a successful career, a wife, children, the whole American dream.

That part surprised me because, after all, I met him in an emergency shelter. It turned out, though, that his home had lost power and he simply needed to charge his cellphone.

What he wanted people to know was that they should never give up on anyone. That if children are cared for and fed, they can flourish.

He said our country never has trouble finding guns and bombs for wars but keeps insisting that making sure everyone has food and medical treatment is too costly.

It never seems to get better, that old veteran told me, but it should.

He said it’s not especially heroic to shoot people, even for a just cause, but those who feed the starving and take care of the young, well, they’re our true heroes. As far as I’m concerned, so is he.