Dad_enlisted

My father, soon after he enlisted.

Every generation has its war.

For my parents it was World War II. In the early fifties, as
I came into consciousness of the world around me, and the fact that history
hadn’t started with my own birth, I realized there had been this thing in the
past called “the war”. It felt like a living but distant person, or a place,
perhaps, that had been known and visited by everyone in the house except me. My
father and Uncle Dick had both served, in the army and navy respectively, and
both had been involved in serious action. But this was fairly common, in our
small town: many young men had gone. Some had come back, and some had not.

In the front parlor was a photograph of Corky, a young man
in my mother’s class who had been a particular friend of the family and, I
gathered, had had a romantic interest in my mother. He had gone down with his
ship in the Pacific. In addition to the photograph, displayed along with the
family photos, were a few items on my grandmother’s desk that he had brought or
sent from Asia; they felt like icons, or relics which
had significance to the adults that I couldn’t quite fathom. Later my
grandmother told me that he had left some of his clothes in our house, and that
when my mother heard he was dead, she took them all out into the back yard and
burned them.

In the early years, my father sometimes had nightmares that
would wake me in the next room. He had been a tank driver in the infantry in Europe;
he had landed at Normandy the day
after D-Day and gone on to fight in the Battle of the Bulge. He said very little about his war experiences, which had been
graphic, exhausting, and sustained, and had included long periods of hospitalization.
When he came home, like so many other GIs, he just wanted to try to have a
normal life. He was the son of the Methodist minister who had recently been
posted to that small upstate New York town, and yet he was the opposite of pious and straight-laced: a bright light
who rode into my mother’s life, smiling, on a Harley Davidson. I bet he was the
most exciting thing she’d seen for a long time, and very handsome too.

The war made him give up any interest he had had in hunting
and guns, even though he had been an expert marksman; one day, while he was
renovating an attic space into a den, he took his rifle and walled it up in the
closet. He did, however, watch war movies when they started to be shown on
television. As the nation began to enter into the years of the Cold War and
nuclear arms race, I can remember begging him to turn the sound down because
the planes and bombing disturbed me so much when I was trying to go to sleep. (Broadcast
media and antennas were an ongoing interest of my father’s, so we had early
televisions, and experimental antennas in the attic. At night, walking me up
and down the hall to try to get me to sleep, he used to show me the parts of
the radios and amplifiers he was working on – apparently one of my first words
was “tubes.” Later, I used to help sort the parts for his Heathkit projects and
hold things in place while he soldered them.)

Everyone we knew had lost someone in World War II, but the
war had also defined and changed them. Dad never joined the VFW or participated
in veteran’s parades or communities; his uniform was folded and put away in a
trunk, and only taken out once or twice that I remember, probably when I asked
to see it. I grew up with the sense that he had seen things none of the rest of
us had seen, and that part of his sense of self meant protecting his wife and
child from that. He had done it, and never spoke of his service as heroic; he
said flatly that war was hell, and became less and less interested and
supportive of the military as the years went by. His kneecaps had been
shattered in an accident and replaced by steel, and glass from the same
accident was still working its way out of his face when I was a little girl. I
remember when the movie M*A*S*H, about the Korean War, came out, we went to see
it in the theater. I was sitting next to my father, and there was a running gag
where someone was always saying, “Goddam Army,” and at the end of the movie,
when an officer can’t get a jeep to run, he says, “Goddam Army. Goddam Army
jeep!” My father muttered, “’Goddam Army’ is right.”

But the funny thing was that the most tangible relic of
World War II that we had was, in fact, our jeep – a 1952 Willys army surplus
jeep. My father loved to drive it – hotrod it – and when there were kids
around, a favorite thing was for him to take us on “wingdings” – hair-raising
rides around and around the edges of a nearby gravel pit, and then down the
back road where there were some big bumps that would lift us right off the
seats. Of course none of us had seat belts or any safety equipment at all, and
the exhaust fumes came circling up in the back, making us cough and sometimes
get sick, but everyone screamed and begged for more, and he was happy to
oblige. My mother often went along, good sport that she was, and she would try
also try to keep him under control, but their banter was part of the whole
experience – Dad pushing the envelope, Mom trying to reign him in. 

We still have the jeep, and Dad uses it for snow-plowing and
hauling brush all the time. I love it, but find it very hard to drive – it’s
his vehicle. When Dad and I go off on an errand in it together, it feels like
old times – we’re both grinning. It’s very low-mileage – a little more than
30,000 miles – and the body was restored, maybe a dozen years ago. He’s
planning to do a valve job on it right away – as soon as Charlie, at the
garage, gets the new gaskets in.