This week, we opened a small wooden box that we kept for more than 50 years. We called it “The Bicentennial Box” because it held keepsakes from America’s 200th birthday in 1976. The plan was to keep it sealed until 2076, so our grandchildren — or maybe even great-grandchildren — could open it on the nation’s 300th birthday.

But, as America marks its 250th anniversary this year, our family’s curiosity got the better of us. We voted, and the decision to open it won. My son-in-law had the honor of using a hammer to pry open the lid.

It’s probably no surprise that we had a bicentennial box. Growing up in Hannibal, N.Y., in the 1950s, the Fourth of July was always special. Every year, fireworks lit up the sky over Fair Haven, a small village about eight miles away on Lake Ontario. Our house sat on a hill, so from our backyard we could see the distant bursts of color just above the horizon. Each Independence Day, our family gathered outside to watch those small flashes of red, white, and blue against the summer sky.

Fifty-three years ago, in 1973, I spent the Fourth of July flying combat missions over Cambodia. In my journal that day, I wrote:

“4 July 1973: To celebrate today, I am again off to Cambodia to drop some firecrackers and sparklers. I will be glad when the war ends, but it appears that they will be stepping things up now that we have to be out of Cambodia in August.”

That was the main event of the day. I don’t remember anything else about that Fourth of July — no baseball games, no........

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