About Our Veterans

[SnohoDem]

Obviously, anyone is free to reply to this in any way they want, but I'd rather make it a thread about veterans than a thread about my father. Tell about the veterans you know or about your own experiences.

About my Dad -

He was born in Southwestern Louisiana and left school after the sixth grade to help support the family, doing any odd job he could. It was the Depression and everybody did anything to get some money.

He joined the army shortly after Pearl Harbor was attacked. He tried out for the paratroopers but was injured in training and wound up as a dogface in the third infantry division.

During his service he made three amphibious landings. North Africa, Italy (I don't know if it was Salerno or Anzio) and Southern France. He was wounded three or four times. In the winter of 1944/45 his feet froze so badly the doctors wanted to amputate them. He begged them not to, and they left his feet. He would have problems with them for the rest of his life. For him the war was over. He never made it to Germany.

When I was a boy I would ask about the war and he would tell me funny stories about getting drunk, stealing a jeep and getting busted back to private again. Or something about eating great food in France, even with a war on. They were always funny and made the war sound great. He never rose higher than corporal and couldn't have given a shit - he was like the hundreds of thousands of men who just wanted to get it over and go home. Willie and Joe, if you know what I mean...

He had PTSD and his memories and his wounds until he died. His feet were Godawful and the shrapnel in his back caused problems and he was in pain from 1943 until he died in 1976. He was a prescription drug addict and, until about 1967, a very heavy drinker.

But he did his best to come back and make a normal life. He came home, married my mother, raised three sons and was a union carpenter until he was forcibly retired at 48 years old. His body was shot. He died three years later.

When I was a senior in high school and in the year after I would stay out very late, getting home at two or three AM. Sometimes I would come home to find him sitting on the couch, drinking coffee.

"Hey son, how did it go tonight?", he'd ask.

"Oh I'm fine Dad, why are you up so late?"

"Fritz is visiting me again." That's all he would have to say, and I understood. He was probably stoned on pain killers, tranquilizers and mood elevators, but he couldn't sleep. It was then he began to talk about the war. The real war.

The stories he told were horrific and there's no reason to repeat them. Except one.

When he finally got out of combat he was sent to England to help guard German POWs. He'd been a machine gunner and he figured he'd killed a lot of Germans. He wasn't proud. He wasn't happy about it. He did not see himself as a hero.

He said when he was a guard he'd meet German soldiers, often younger or maybe the same age as him. As they became friends (the war was ending and these guys weren't going anywhere) they would show him pictures from home that they kept in their wallets - mother, father, family, maybe a girlfriend or wife or even a baby. He was horrified. The 'animals' he had been killing were people just like him. It changed him forever.

My father grew up in one of the most racist places in the US, but by the time I knew him he despised racism. One of the few times he ever spanked me was for teasing a black kid. I saw him throw an old friend out of our house for disparaging MLK when coverage of a march was on the news. That man never came to our house again.

My Dad wasn't a solicitous, pandering, latte sipping liberal who wanted to 'help black people'. He had a lesson seared into him in that POW camp: we're all the same beneath the skin or the nationality or the whatever. All people deserved respect and all people really were created equal in the sense of the dignity and respect they deserved. One day he was fixing the air conditioner of the black man across the street. That man was an insurance agent and pretty prosperous, with a wife and a lovely baby daughter. He said something to my Dad, and my Dad replied, "If you're gonna act like I'm Mistah Charlie I'm gonna take my Goddamn tools and go home. You're my neighbor and I can help. That's what people do." They became fast friends. My Dad's name was Charlie.

I know this is rambling but I want to say a few more things.

He hated war but wasn't a coward. He volunteered for Korea. When the recruiters said he was too old and too banged up and had done his time and asked why in the Hell he would volunteer, he replied, "Because I know how to stay alive and these kids you're gonna send over there don't." That story comes from my mother. My Dad never told it, but I can imagine him coming home pissed off and telling her.

He was against the Vietnam war. Not against the kids who had to go, but against the war. He thought it was stupid. He probably thought the Korean war was stupid, too, but he was still young enough to go. He sure as hell didn't want any of us boys to go.

Where I grew up, in Louisiana and later in Houston, Texas, just about everyone's father had been in WW2. We were all working class and it was the norm.

My Dad was just one person out of hundreds of thousands of Americans serving in that war. Although uneducated, he was far from stupid, and was able to take at least one good lesson from that horror and keep it with him and impart it to his children. As damaged as he was, he did his best to be a good citizen and a good father.

That's who our veterans are. He died 35 years ago and I still miss him.

[pinto]

1. Thank you.

Beautiful post.