Don't know if your Dad was ever military, but I've always liked this one, from Hemingway. Published in Colliers in 1944, but he wrote it in 1938, while observing the Spanish Civil War:

"You love a lot of things if you live around them. But there isn't any woman and there isn't any horse, not any before nor after, that is as lovely as a great airplane. And men who love them are faithful to them even though they leave them for others. A man has one virginity to lose in fighters, and if it is a lovely airplane he loses it to, there is where his heart will forever be."