My Manifesto: The Incoherent Ramblings of a Madman

Recollections Of A War To Remember
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Michael Kirkland (UPI) Tuesday 1st June, 2004

I remember my father. His life was short, and when he was little more than a child by our reckoning, he was plunged into the cauldron of war.

My parents' contemporaries have been called, in Tom Brokaw's phrase, "The Greatest Generation" so often that it's become a cliché.

Whether they were or not I have no real way of knowing. In their time, everything was possible, but life was chancy and with the big war looming over the nation, every moment counted. I know they were heroes to me.

My father and I had very little in common.

I was a reader, content to find a quiet corner of the house to devour a book. He was a doer, constantly in motion. If he came home from a hard day's work he usually found several things to do around the house or yard. And if he finished his own chores, he was quite happy to grab a broom and start sweeping, or grab the youngest of his seven children and get them ready for bed.

While others who had not seen war enjoyed the holiday, my father never had a Veterans Day off from work.

He couldn't understand why I wasn't more like him.

But there was one way we could relate. I could ask him about his war.

This was in the 1950s, when the bitter struggle that engaged the whole world was much fresher in people's minds than Vietnam is today.

I think I was about 3 when I first heard my father talk with contempt about his commanding general, Patton, "old blood and guts."

"Our blood, his guts," Dad sneered. This from a man who rarely had anything bad to say about anyone.

Still, he was proud of his role in the war. He had left school and volunteered at 17. Both of his brothers ended up in uniform. All three would be in combat at the same time.

My father was an infantryman in the 4th Armored Division, which was the spearhead of Patton's Third Army. At the tip of the spear were three or four half-tracks carrying combat troops ahead of the tanks. When they met opposition the infantrymen would debouche to protect the tanks.

My father usually found himself in one of the first two or three half-tracks, 25 miles ahead of the line.

My mother and father met in Washington at a USO dance before he was shipped out. She was an Italian-American, too naïve to let wander about by herself, visiting some friends working for the War Department. Over the past two years, she had turned down four proposals of marriage. She just hadn't met the one.

He was a handsome young Texan, red hair shining, crisp in his new private's uniform. He asked her to dance, towering over her, and they danced together for the rest of the night.

In those days, every young woman had to have a service member to write. It was just what you did. My mother's first serviceman, in the Navy, died at Pearl Harbor. So when on an impulse my father asked her to write him in Europe, she said yes.

She would write him every day. He would write her once a week most of the time. He proposed in a letter and she accepted.

But she would say that she really didn't know him, that she accepted him as her life's partner after spending only a few hours with him in person.

In combat, you buddied up with someone you could trust to watch your back. In one letter, he told her how his best friend had just been killed beside him. "He went on and on and on about how much he was going to miss his friend," my mother said later. "I thought, 'Is he drunk?'"

He wasn't of course. He was an emotional Texan, in a Lyndon Johnson kind of way, given to broad gestures and sentimentality.

My father's war was particularly bloody. His squad suffered "100 percent casualties," he would tell me, always with a kind of wonder that he survived and others did not. "Four killed and eight of us wounded." My father was wounded twice, both times by shrapnel. For the first wound, the most severe, they let him recover in Paris.

Like all wars, my father's had its atrocities. He would tell me how other GIs would cut the fingers from swollen German corpses to get their gold wedding rings.

Late in the war, they overran an SS position, and the men in Nazi uniforms tried to surrender, yelling out that they were Czech, not German. The U.S. soldier beside my father was carrying the Browning automatic rifle, and as the enemy stood up, hands in the air, he killed them all before my father could intervene.

But he understood why it was done. "His best friend had just been killed," Dad said, repeating it to make sure I understood as well. "His best friend had just been killed."

They also overran a concentration camp. The SS guards tried to use heavy equipment to bury the corpses, but the 4th Armored was coming too fast. The people living in the town below the camp claimed they didn't know what was going on. My father's general had the troops march the townspeople past the stacks of corpses at gunpoint -- everyone except for one pregnant woman. "Now you know what was going on," the general said.

My father participated in the great left turn, the tanks and half-tracks rolling fast, up to Luxembourg for the relief of Bastogne. The fighting was heavy and they had outrun their supplies. "All I had to eat for Christmas (1944) was an apple."

Toward the end, the boys and men of the 4th Armored were driving hard to Berlin. They would have beaten the Russians to the city if President Truman hadn't promised Stalin to let the Red Army have the honor -- and take the heavy casualties.

My father's unit ended up making a right turn into Czechoslovakia, Hitler was dead and the war in Europe was over. Truman used the atom bomb, and the troops in Europe knew they wouldn't be going to Japan. The fighting stopped all over the world.

When I was very young, I'd sometimes ask my father if he had killed anyone in the war. Being young and stupid, I desperately wanted him to say yes. He always said no, but he wouldn't look at me when he said it.

My father came home and visited my mother in her little West Virginia town. He was wearing his uniform. Like most soldiers who had just been mustered out, it was the only suit of clothes he had.

My mother hadn't spoken to her father in two years after some argument that wasn't worth remembering. Still, she asked my father to talk to the old man before they could become engaged.

Luckily, my father never met a stranger. He asked my grandfather formally for my mother's hand, and called him "Dad" when he did it. The old Italian, who slept with pistols under his pillow and sometimes carried a derringer in his sleeve, usually scared the hell out of people. When my father called him "Dad" his eyes filled with tears.

The marriage was a success. But it was forged in a different time, when our own worries and modern self-involvement would have seemed alien and petty. Though my mother outlived my father for 15 years, she carried his wedding ring on a gold chain around her neck until the day she died.

They're buried together now on a hill in West Virginia.