Saving My Dad’s (Private Ryan)

We always (not this year) do a Veteran's Day program at school. My town had at old guy who was well documented as being involved in the D-Day invasion. He came off the landing craft onto the beach, the whole nine yards. One year, we brought him in to speak. He was 90+.
I know his son in law. He pulled me aside when we were getting set up and said, "Look, I don't know what he's going to say. We're not real sure what he actually did and what he's watched and read over the years and convinced himself it was him."
I said, "Ahhhhhh, as long as he doesn't claim he shot Hitler or something, the kids won't know the difference."

 

I was reading the Society for American Baseball Research biography of Grover Cleveland Alexander a while back. He went to the trenches during WWI, and not only lost a lot of his hearing, but the writer believes he suffered PTSD as well, which led to his alcoholism and struggles later in life.

 

My mother had an uncle who was an MP during the 1940s and 50s. I don't think he ever went overseas. I've seen a couple of pictures of him smiling in his uniform and in a jeep, but that's all I really know about his stint. He died in his 40s, and I don't know how.

I had an uncle who was in the Army reserves in the early 1960s. We never really talked about it, and I don't think he ever went overseas either.

 

My dad told a few stories in his later years, but they were always about how seasick he was on the ship going over, how thrilled he was to ride on the Queen Mary coming home, etc., light-hearted stuff.

He said one time he and another young guy were on sentry duty in the hedgerows at night and they heard some noises on the other side. They issued a password challenge, heard nothing, so they opened up because they were scared shitless. The next morning it was discovered they'd shot up about four or five cows. I suspect he had other stories he kept to himself.

My dad was always pretty mellow, a conciliator as a high school administrator, rather than a complete hard ass like some of his veteran brethren. Long hair in the 1960s didn't bug him, and after he died we heard countless stories from students describing how he'd listen to their problems, offer solutions, and sometimes even back them against a teacher, unheard of at that time. The one thing he didn't tolerate was being lied to. Tell him the truth, and he could work things out.

He could certainly be tough when needed. But I've always believed he figured out pretty early in his life that once you've survived a war at 18 years of age, there's no need to sweat the small stuff. He realized that hair length, tight pants, short skirts and minor discipline problems weren't hills he was willing to die on.

 

My father-in-law was on a destroyer in the Pacific theater, I believe it was a destroyer. He was on the crew for one of the big guns. I think he handed ammunition over. It cost him his hearing. But he his service was cut short. Sometime during his enlistment, he started sleepwalking. If you sleep walk, you cannot serve in the Navy. He was discharged.

 

My father didn't talk about the war much. He told funny stories about stuff that happened in training infantry soldiers, screw ups reading maps and 2nd Lts. getting lost and hiking through a swamp, stuff like that. I remember him talking about fighting in the hedgerows. If you are not familiar, these are small fields in France which have been farmed for hundreds of years. When farmers plowed up stones, they threw them out to the edge of the fields. Eventually they collected into rock walls held together with dirt, and the farmers would plant hedge plants on top, with the wall being five or six feet tall with two feet of hedge on top. The roots would grow down through the dirt and rock and the dirt walls became very dense and hard. The infantry would walk down the country lanes between these in sunken country lanes, with no idea if there were a couple of hundred Germans on the other side of the wall, remaining silent and aiming at the gate to enter the field they were in, ready to slaughter anyone who entered.

He remembered his company being quiet inside one of these and hearing the Germans talking on the other side of the hedgerow. The routine for that was three or four guys getting along the wall and on signal, all of them throwing a white phosphorus grenade, which explodes and throws burning phosphorus. If it hits you it will burn right through your arm and out the bottom of it. So the recipe was to throw WP, which would get them up and running around, and then follow those with two frag grenades. Like I said, he didn't talk about it much, and that sort of thing is why, I guess.

I remember that we took a trip to south Georgia, where his family was from. We were sitting in a little cafe, and for some reason he got to talking about some guys from his company who were from the area. He mentioned one guy in particular who was killed, died bad and bloody. A lady in the booth behind him overheard and turned and asked "what was the name of that soldier again?" He was her father, and she wanted details because they never really knew what happened. They moved to another table and he talked to her about him for twenty minutes, half an hour.

Pop eventually came back and we left. We were in the car and he said, "Hell, if I'd had any idea who she was I never would have opened my mouth. That was rough."

 

I heard something the other day, and it's 100% spot on.
If a guy is or claims to be a veteran and he immediately starts talking about missions and exploits, he's full of shit.
If he starts talking about guys he served with, he's legit.

 

Nod. Most of the guys who have been there and done that don't have a lot to say about it unless they are around guys who they know were too.

And beware of stories which start out "No, shit, there I was and..." They might be the gospel truth, or they might be the military version of a Pecos Bill story.

 

Here is my maternal great grandmother. The one on the left was killed in Italy and at the time of his obituary it states that the others were in Australia, Arkansas, Hawaii and England. I know for sure that 3 of them came back. She was 55-56 at that time.
Interesting story from the hometown paper. My father made scrapbooks when it was the beige construction paper type albums. This one is Vermont, home town area, military notices. He has volumes of other scrapbooks such as "deaths"1, "deaths"2, etc. ...he liked to use quotation marks. And other volumes of stuff of interest to him. He should know that I have lugged them from SC to CT to VT to SC. (he also had his ankle cast mounted on a wooden Hawaiian island that our neighbor carved for him., that's where he broke it)

 

I found this blog a few years ago, called “Letters of a World War II Airman,” in which a young soldier from Chicago was writing letters to and from his family. I read it from the beginning to the end, and figured I’d share it here.

Letters of a World War II Airman