Private Soldier

You were there so I could be here. That’s all I need to know. That’s all you would tell me when I asked about the war. Little did I know that an entire generation responded in kind by not saying much about their experience over there. “I was there so you could be here,” were your exact words. “That’s all you need to know.” Those words echo in my head now, long after you’re gone. When my son asks for details, that’s all I know. All I need to know. But it’s not enough for him. He takes up interest in World War II, reads books and articles, watches documentaries, longs to plan a pilgrimage to retrace steps from the Normandy beach where you arrived on D-Day plus 4 to the strategic crossroad town of St. Lo which you liberated, through the hedgerows and across Belgium where you ultimately fought in the German Ardennes Offensive, better known as the Battle of the Bulge. I learn about my father from my son.

      Could you have imagined such a thing as a teenager after leaving Brooklyn, let alone North America, for the first time in your life to fight Nazis in Europe? When you left an immigrant ghetto to find yourself the only Jew in a company of gentiles who’d never met such a person before? Did you ever think of the children you might someday have even though you had not yet met the woman you would marry? Perhaps that’s what kept you going as you witnessed unimaginable horrors you would never speak of so as to never revisit. You were there so I could be here. That may be all I need to know. But there are others who need to know more. Thankfully, that quest for knowledge continues.

      There’s a photo of my father as a young soldier somewhere in Europe. He’s standing on a wooden plank bridge suspended by chains outside a stone tower with an arch behind him and a fellow soldier facing away. That’s all we know about the who, what, where and when of this singular extant image, our framed family relic of a World War. So many questions remain unanswered.

      The Honorable Discharge papers carefully folded and stored away for over half a century reveal some more details of the tour of duty that began with enlistment in July 1943, entry into active service in October and separation at Point Jackson, S.C. in November 1945. The frail parchment certificate awarded as a testimonial of my father’s “honest and faithful service” to his country identifies the 157 pound 20 year old as Technician Fifth Grade serving in the Medical Detachment of the 119th Infantry. It lists decorations and citations in a run-on sentence of military distinctions (Victory Medal World II American Theatre Ribbon European African Middle Eastern Theater Ribbon 5 Bronze Battle Stars Good Conduct Medal Bronze Star Medal Silver Star Medal) as well as battles and campaigns (Normandy, Northern France, Ardennes, Rhineland, Central Europe).

      Revisiting this photo on the 80th anniversary of the day this soldier who would someday be my father landed on Omaha Beach, I ask myself questions I never pondered but have been lurking like an undertow beneath the surface. How interested was I to learn about the war and my father’s service? Did I really want to know? If and when I asked, was it merely an academic question? A query for the sake of a classroom exercise? Did I really care? Was I the product of a post-war less great generation that took American comforts for granted before we even knew what entitlement meant? Coming of age in an era with no draft, a volunteer army, and the promise of a college education whether I wanted it or not were all things my father would have died for, literally. He was there so I could be here. Did I appreciate his sacrifice? Did he require me to?

      Was it not until my son was old enough to ask about the grandfather he barely knew that I realized how little I knew of that man? Was it guilt I felt at having squandered opportunities to learn more from a primary source? Was it shame at not pressing further, pushing back, insisting on knowing what he was so reluctant to share? Or was it respect for his authority, and appreciation of his reluctance to revisit the living hell he survived from Omaha Beach to the front lines of battlefields across France and Belgium?

      On the day of my daughter’s 2nd birthday, I came home late from the city, missing the family dinner and cake presentation as if I were a negligent parent. After leaving the office that day and before heading home, I stopped by the hospital while my father was there for a radiation treatment. His cancer had metastasized and the oncologist ordered another MRI to assess the extent of its spread through his bones. I didn’t know this was underway when I arrived to find his room empty. I checked a couple of places he and my mother might be — the lounge, the snack bar, the nurse’s station — but there was no clue so I headed for the elevator to make it home for the birthday celebration. When the door opened, there he was on a gurney en route to the subterranean magnetic resonance chamber. My mother, looming over him, was a wreck. The moment she saw my face, I saw relief like never before. “Thank God,” she shrieked. “You’re here!”

      Little did I know that the former medic was about to return to those God forsaken trenches of Europe in his chemo-induced delirium during the final months of his life when he was slid into a lifesize/deathsize tube and the rat-ta-tat-tat of electronic beams sound to him like shells of enemy fire. His screams can be heard from within the metal cylinder until this son is compelled to trigger the escape on his behalf, indicating to the technician that the scan is to be aborted and never repeated.

      I was there.