Armed to the Teeth

I think I was about five years old when I discovered my father and one of my uncles had fought in World War II. I don’t remember the discovery being dramatic; it had probably been mentioned casually as part of a larger conversation, but I learned that both of them were thought very brave. The fact wasn’t discussed with me or my siblings or cousins until years later, and even then details weren’t forthcoming. Having a marine for a father and a parachute in- fantryman for an uncle wasn’t thought remarkable by us. What was remarkable, or to be more precise, disturbing, were the wounds they had suffered. My father bore an appallingly large scar that coiled around his left knee, and spinal damage that kept him from tossing us in the air unless he was standing in chest-deep water. My uncle carried German shrapnel in his body from several different battles. At times during the fifteen years following the smashing of the Reich he couldn’t play with us at all, bed-ridden as slivers and shards of the metal worked their way out of his arms and torso. Neither of them ever complained. I saw medals they had received for acts of except- ional bravery, but not the citations. They never mentioned them to me; in fact, like the vast majority of veterans I’ve known, they simply didn’t talk about what they has gone through. There were certainly moments when I was tempted to ask questions, but I always remembered my manners, and didn’t.

Instead, answers of a sort were stated during the almost constant bragging on playgrounds and schoolyards about what fathers and assorted male relatives had done overseas. Always overseas - I don't recall anyone admitting that their father, brother, etc had been stationed at home, or, for that matter, talking about how the old man had spent the war at a regular job and been around for dinner every night. This must have made all of us quite rare in the history of war. (Come to think of it, none of us had female family members who had served either, which meant we were positively unique.) The most popular stories were usually high heroic accounts of fighting the ‘jerries’ and ‘krauts’ or ‘japs’ and ‘nips’, the details vivid and unrealistic, having been embroidered by imaginations stoked by armchair warriors, B movies and comic books. Where the latter was concerned, two of my favorites were All American Men at War and Blackhawk. Occasionally we encountered something much more intelligent, for instance movies like Robert Aldrich’s Attack!, Paths of Glory, and John Huston’s adaptation of the novel by Stephen Crane, Red Badge of Courage, (with the role of the young infantryman struggling with his cowardice played by none other than Audie Murphy, who I knew was as brave a soldier who had ever lived). That was not the last irony of this sort I encountered as I began to learn what really happens to those in battle. I learned my dad hated sport hunting; that my uncle far preferred lighthearted costume dramas and musicals when he took my cousins and I to the movies, on one memorable occasion proving he had already seen The Music Man by singing parts of the dialogue and songs performed by Robert Preston. I learned they were much more complicated - and interesting - than comic book stereotypes and  portraits created by myth-makers. I learned more about what had motivated both of them to volunteer rather than wait to be drafted and to fight with the most fierce personal commitment to doing everything they could to defeat the enemy. This need to know them and what had happened to them continued for decades beyond when they passed, my uncle when I was in my mid-thirties and the old man several years later. 

Then, a couple of months I ago, I made a list of the weapons carried by my father at the front. A 1903 Springfield rifle; UMD (Marlin) submachine gun; Smith & Wesson .357 magnum revolver; handmade fighting knife; heavy brass knuckles; grenades and as much ammunition as he could carry. For some reason I had never done this before, but once the list was finished - it had taken less than a minute - I knew for a certainty that all the items had been put to use many times; sometimes to save and sometimes to destroy. Armed to the teeth indeed.

That’s the most unvarnished piece of information I have about his life during the war.

And now in my 68th year, I discover myself bold in my heart with the surity that my dad and my uncle were, in the best sense of the word, men, who went to fight because despite their flaws, they were armed to the teeth, not only with the tools of war, but with the en- during virtues that helped them endure that experience, that most singular and terrible passage of their lives.