My father's war stories

The last time my father and I talked about his war was on a January day after one of those overblown movies came out that lamely tried to dramatize what its producers had conceived as the heroism of the Greatest Generation. It had been given to him as a Christmas present, in a boxed set, but I doubt he ever watched it.

He landed in Normandy on Utah Beach a week or more after D-Day, June 6, 1944 as part of the flotilla. I never heard him say that he wanted to revisit the experience. The few times I found a way to get him to talk about it, he could only manage a string of disjointed sentences. But that last day, for some reason, he opened up a bit.

As an infantryman, born in the Bronx and unaccustomed to the sea, Dad already had a gruesome passage across the Atlantic— cruising, he said mordantly, on a converted South American ocean liner. Crossing the English Channel from Liverpool to France after D-Day, he and most of the other GIs spent the anxious passage in their cramped quarters together, vomiting for hours before they were dropped into icy water a hundred yards or so from the beach.

His version of hell

Soaking wet, eyeing the smoke hovering over the shrubs and barbed wire, they came out of the waves and onto the blood tinctured sands stunned by the remains of the carnage, avoiding body parts, he said, that still lay underfoot.

Sitting near Dad that day, I could feel, as much in his halting voice as in the tone of his remembering, the bitter, fear-thickened breezes enveloping him and the soldiers of the landing party. They knew what had happened there, by rumor and, after a few whiffs, by the lingering stench. Each one of them was shivering and uncertain to death about what they were going to face that day. Or, the next. If there would be one.

That was just about the daily given for the year or so ahead, though they didn't know how long it would take, of if they would survive, all of which sounded to me like the introduction to a version of hell and, probably, why Dad never believed in it. Or, heaven, either.

On his deathbed

The first Allied soldiers that came into sight, he did say, were those who had been there— fighting, holding on, desperately fighting. They were at once frenzied and slow moving, their faces blackened, and they stared, my Dad said, "wild eyed, wild. Like in the movies, guys with make-up. When I saw the ones who had been there fighting, I took a step back."

I knew that these events had occurred more than 40 years earlier, but as Dad spoke, the muscles in his face tightened. Then he stopped talking and pressed his lips together, his eyes turned inward, and he pulled his breath in through his nose. For him, the details of D-Day and his landing that morning were events that left a vicious scar to be forgotten, although that didn't seem possible. And, as I realize now, decades years later, not only did Dad never forget his experiences, he carried them with him, as I was to hear— and write down— even as he lay on his deathbed, in 2004, dying from cancer without respite from either the terrible pain or the memories of his war.

When I was younger, mostly at family events and with a few selected male relatives at that, my father would relate anecdotes about the war but little else that I was allowed to hear. His Honorable Discharge Record lists, "Battles and Campaigns: Central Europe"“ Normandy"“ Northern France"“ Rhineland." But he was never specific about where he had been. He might not even have known at the time. And in 1973, a great fire destroyed many records at the Military Archives Center in Louisville, Missouri.

Psychological scars

But today incredible documents can be found on-line. Based on what information I've researched so far, I've pieced together a tentative history of Dad's movements.

In Europe, I locate him at the attacks in the Brest Peninsula of France, at the Hurtgen Forest and, perhaps, at the Battle of the Bulge and in the Ardennes. All of these were vicious battles that took a devastating toll on American and British soldiers. According to some estimates, the U.S. suffered more than 20,000 casualties in Brest and 30,000 in the Hurtgen Forest. Those who weren't killed or wounded must have suffered psychological scars almost as devastating.

Whenever I tried to ask Dad about towns and battles, he remained vague. Only now, with the profusion of maps and histories currently available, does it all seem pretty clear to me: He was in the middle of the worst fucking battles that occurred in Europe and he lived on the ground, fearing for his life every day for 11 consecutive months (with some breaks in Paris after its liberation in late August 1944). And he was there in the war's aftermath— though I don't know for exactly how long.

Encounter with Patton

Over the decades, I heard other stories for Dad about a brigade of turbaned Turks who were called in for overnight raids on German strongholds, unstoppable Russian soldiers, bombs shattering trees in a forest somewhere, and an encounter with General George C. Patton himself. Dad once told me that he had been promoted to Corporal. But he gave the stripes back almost immediately. He didn't want responsibility for others.

I don't know what he chose not to relate. He did receive two Purple Hearts. From the scars on the back of his knee, I do know that he had his leg torn to shreds by a land mine; and he once related that he had been hit and blinded for five straight days. But he stopped short of telling me what he felt, lying in a tent, hearing the fighting just outside and the cries of the wounded throughout the night. I can only imagine what he experienced, full of fear, yet tough, as he raced through the prospect of being blind for the rest of his life, or just getting the hell out of there, wherever there was.

Dad did say that on the day the war ended, he fell to the ground.

"'They're vicious'

As he lay on his deathbed nine years ago, leaden and nearly deranged with too many drugs, I sat close by, working on my laptop and watching the Yankees, the team Dad had loved since the days of Babe Ruth. In off moments, he would blurt out "Son of a bitch" or a word like "Plum" or "Sheepskin." Once, calmly, he murmured, "Something beautiful is happening."

But he also erupted with shouts, like, "Watch out. Don't get caught." On another afternoon, two words—"They're vicious" spilled out of his mouth. "I did, but why did I leave him there?" was another dark utterance. He appeared to be processing memories and trying to tame his swirling thoughts amidst the pain and disorientation.

I'm sure that some of his last thoughts were connected to the war; and, while part of me wants to know what happened to him over there, I can't but feel that he was wiser, for whatever reasons, to keep it to himself. That was his gift to me. By making me do the hard work of tracking down his story on my own, he made me appreciate the much harder ordeal he and and millions of other soldiers endured to allow my generation to live today in comfort and freedom.