When we were growing up Dad never talked of the war. My brother Jan and I had a scoutmaster who talked about it a lot, and knew other adults who told stories about it. We pressed him to tell us about his experiences. He refused. There were only four things he ever said about it.

When we wanted a gun like the other kids were getting, he said guns were only good for one thing, killing people, and he had been around enough of them for a lifetime.

When we asked him to go camping with us on scout trips like the other fathers he said, “I camped out enough in Europe to last a lifetime!”

The third was after my brother and I found his medals for heroism while looking through his dresser for, what else do young boys go through their father’ things looking for but pornography, which we did in fact find. Pretty hard-core stuff, too. Snapshots that came from a Kodak Brownie. We were smart enough to not let him know we knew of the medals, but we redoubled our efforts to get him to talk. He quite adamantly refused and said once and for all (we knew when we had reached his limits through previously inflicted corporal punishments), “The only men who talk about combat are the ones who didn’t really go through it.”

The fourth was when in what must have been an unguarded moment he told my brother he had been a sniper, and “I saw the faces of the men I killed.” Guess that was reason enough you might not want to remember the war. I found a letter to my mom about being in sniper school.

Some years later “Saving Private Ryan” came out. I asked if he had seen it. This was after I finally got him to tell me about his war experience in his mid-70’s, only a few years before he died. I asked if he had been able to handle it. He said it was realistic, he had no problems with it, but he couldn’t understand what Tom Hanks said to Matt Damon as he was dying on the bridge. I told him it was, “Earn this. Earn this.” His response was “Oh, yeah. That makes sense now.”

When he did finally answer my request to speak of the war, it was after decades of not asking. I was out to dinner with him and Mom at the Captain’s Tavern, a favorite restaurant near our home in South Miami. Of course, he was having his grouper Island Style, smothered with olives, tomatoes and what all. We were alone. It was like the floodgates were opened. And he talked.

He said war was an utterly dehumanizing experience. There was little like the glamorization of bravery as in the Hollywood movies up till that time (‘Ryan’ was still a couple of year’s off). I asked about the scene where a soldier’s buddy was killed when a shell landed, and he started yelling “Those dirty rotten Kraut’s” and had to be held back by his buddies to keep from going off and getting killed himself. He said your first thought wasn’t grief for Joe or Willy. That came later. Your first thought was, “Whew, that was close! Thank God it wasn’t me”! 

I asked him about the scene in Erich Maria Remarque’s famous antiwar novel, All Quiet On The Western Front. The experienced German sergeant in the first War is leading his raw recruits into battle for the first time.  Shells start falling and one of the soldiers had the shit scared out of him. I asked him about that. He landed D+3 in Normandy, the third day of the invasion. He said from the moment you landed until VE Day you were scared to death. I will say his letters to my mother implied shipping overseas later. They could have been instructed to misrepresent, given the secrecy of Operation Overlord. I could have mis-recollected what he said.

His letters from the fall of 1944 did clearly show he was in Patton’s army. They also were during the Bulge “on captured German paper”. His letter from England which said he was wounded and in hospital was also during the time of the great battle.

He told a story of relieving the soldiers in Bastogne. They occupied a forest where the Germans had just retreated. It turned out the reason our planes could not find the Panzers is that the Germans hid them in trenches. These were long trenches with ramps on each end. They were a bit wider than a tank, and the Germans covered them crosswise with trees they cut down, hiding them. The tanks could easily drive in and out of them, hiding when Allied air cover arrived.

When the Third Army moved in, the Germans turned the 88’s on this forest and proceeded to shell the shit out of the GI’s. Another reason Leon said the men hated Patton. He refused to bring up his precious tanks to push the howitzers back out of range, leaving the dogfaces unprotected.

During a lull in the shelling, Leon, the master sergeant in his platoon, took advantage of the opportunity to leave the trench to relieve himself. He had barely gotten his pants down and squatted before the 88’s opened up again. Finishing as quickly as he could and not bothering to get his pants all the way up again, he left the tree he was behind and waddled as quickly as he could back to the trench. He was greeted by the business end of several bayonets.

“Let me in, damn you!”

“Not until you tell us you wiped your ass!”

Leon was in a foxhole in the Bulge. He was in it with another GI named Davie. A shell hit nearby at the base of a tree, and it fell right across the edge of their hole.

 Davie said

“When I tell you start yelling ‘Medic’.”

“Sure”, Leon replied.

Davie wormed his way into the small space under the tree and on the edge of the foxhole. He said

“OK, Go ahead.”

Leon started yelling “Medic.” Two of them came, helped him pull the tree off Davie, and as they are carrying him on the stretcher back to base Leon says he was thinking how he was going to kill him when he had the chance.

I asked

“Because he was a coward?”

“No” came the reply. “Because he thought of it first!”

As he had previously said, from the time you landed until the time you got home, all you thought about was surviving and getting out of there. I guess the best literature on this is Catch-22 where Yossarian spends the whole war trying to find a way to get out of there.

He was a sniper, and he said that the moment you got your shot off you rolled and got out of there, because the Jerries opened up with everything they had on the spot you had been. It was nothing like where the movies show a sniper firing again and again.

I asked about the forced march north to relieve the Bulge. If they hated Patton so much why did it look like they all were killing themselves for him to be the first there. He said they all wanted to get to the head of the column to “take a shot at the bastard!”  He said that anyone who served with him did not believe his death was an accident. He said he did not care about his men. The scene where they are out in the open in the movie, and Patton is standing on the flat car, was the perfect example. “We spent the whole time looking over our shoulders for the Luftwaffe to discover us. They would have taken out the whole Third Army!”

For the rest of Dad’s life a brown envelope with a green check came in the mail every month for the disabilities from his wounds in the war. I have his field jacket. It has a purple heart with two oak leaves. Wounded three times. And his Bronze Star.