The Man Who Raised Me: The Inheritance

By Cliff Potts
Bay Bay City, Leyte, Philippines — July 16, 2026

This is a serialized installment from the autobiography of Cliff Potts.

Advice

He offered very little direct advice.

One warning was never to join a peacetime army. He described it as “a bunch of Boy Scouts.”

The other was shorter and more pointed:

“Whatever you do, stay out of Texas.”

He never explained the statement. He did not need to. Something in his earlier life — family strain, faith, disappointment, or hardship — had fixed that conclusion in place.

I did not follow the warning.

Memory and Grievance

He remembered slights. He did not forgive easily. Silence did not mean forgetting. It meant filing something away.

He distrusted hypocrisy. He valued competence. He respected survival.

Tenderness did not come naturally to him.

The Shape of the Man

Reduced to essentials, he was:

A boy shaped by loss.
A young man structured by war.
A husband who equated work with care.
A father who struggled to express intimacy.
A man who controlled himself carefully.
A man who survived.

He was not an affectionate father in the ways a child recognizes.

But he was not empty.

He was built in an era that did not reward softness.

In ways I only understood later, I inherited parts of him.

Some I have tried to shed.
Some I have kept.
Some surface without warning.

That is the inheritance.