August 21, 2017--Jack: Missing In Action

"I was wondering if I'd ever hear from you or see you again."

It had been a couple of weeks since Jack called or showed up at the Bristol Diner. I had a feeling why that might be, but I didn't want to let him off the hook. So I phoned to give him the business.

Sounding chipper, Jack said, "I've been busy with visitors. You know, it's the busiest week of the summer and, if you can believe it, I had 18 house guests. People were sleeping everywhere--some in the barn where I set up a kind of dorm for the young ones. They had a ball. Still are. About 10 remain. I've been running around stocking up on food and drinks and snacks." 

I let him rattle on. He never brings up domestic matters. All we ever talk about and spat about is politics. Especially how Trump is doing.

"We're having a cookout later today so I don't have a lot of time. I need to get to Hannifords before they run out of chopped meat, hot dogs, and all sorts of accompaniments. Then, over to Reilly's for corn. They have the best corn in the area and I need about a bushel. If I don't get there soon they'll run out and our friends will be disappointed. We do this every year. The corn and Mrs. Chase's pie are the hit of the weekend. So, I have to get three pies. And of course ice cream. People love Gifford's ice cream. Chocolate and vanilla for the pies. And . . ."

Since it was only 9:30 I knew there was no danger of anything being out of stock. So, I said, "I won't keep you, but we know each other well enough for me to see you're vamping."

"Vamping? That's a new one. Actually, sounds funky. I like funky."

"Meaning you're dodging the issue at hand. I would have thought you'd be all over me. What, with everything that's been going on. You of course know what I'm talking about and why you haven't been to the diner. I know about all the guests you have every year in mid-August. In fact, it's during those times that you always come to the diner. To take a break. To hide out for a couple of hours. So don't try to sound so innocent. It's not working with me. If you didn't want to talk you could have ignored my call--I assume you have caller ID. All this bull about hot dogs and corn is a distraction. But then again, you did answer the phone. So what's the story?"

Jack was uncharacteristically silent.

"You have nothing to say about Steve Bannon being fired? Nothing on your mind about Charlottesville? Nothing about what Trump had to say? His initial comments, his phony written statement on Monday and then on Tuesday at that scary news conference when he spoke about what he really believes? About all this you have nothing to say? You, who for two years haven't been able to stop talking about 'your boy' Trump? If you had any integrity you would have been eager to talk about all this. I'm sure, spouting White House spin. Placing blame on the counter demonstrators. Blaming the whole thing on the Black-Lives-Matter people. Maybe even trying to work Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton into the scenario. How it was all their fault that there was violence and murder."

I was furious about what has been going on and Jack's silence.

"So, you're just going to sit there listening to my ranting, pretending you have to go food shopping? The country is coming apart at the seams thanks to the person you helped elect and have been pimping for for two years and you have nothing to say? The world is in turmoil, North Korea hasn't gone away, nor, thank God, has Mueller and his investigators, and you're talking to me about chopped meat?"

I thought I heard Jack groan.

"I'm about finished with you," I said, almost spitting, "Either you start talking or stop coming to the diner and never call me again. I too have caller ID. I'm being serious. You have 10 seconds and then I'm hanging up." I began to count down--"10, 9, 8, 7 . . ."

"I'm also . . . " He was speaking so softly that I couldn't understand what he was saying.

"Speak up, Jack, you know I don't hear that well. I think you mumbled something." I resumed counting--"7, 6, 5 . . ."

In a hushed voice, he said, "My father, bless his soul, was in the army. In combat. The Second World War. In Europe. He landed in Normandy in the third wave. A lot of his comrades were killed even before they reached the beach. They fought their way across France. Pushing toward Germany. Then the Jerries counterattacked. It was the Battle of the Bulge. My father's division was almost surrounded. Cut off. Decimated. More buddies blown up and wounded. 

"He was only 19 years old. I have grandchildren that old. It was a miracle he made it through. Many of his guys were captured and spent the rest of the war in German POW camps. Somehow, the others managed to break out of the trap and kept pushing east. Toward Germany. Along the way, they came to Buchenwald. The concentration camp. Where he learned later 43,000 mainly Jews were exterminated. They liberated the survivors. Who were like living skeletons. More than half dead."

I could hear Jack breathing deeply.

He resumed, "My father, like many GIs, never talked about any of this. Not until he was dying from cancer. When he was 81. That was the first time I heard what he had experienced. The hardest part for him was not what happened to the boys in his platoon. That was hard enough. But Buchenwald, about that . . ."

Jack couldn't finish the story. I waiting for a least a minute, not saying anything, listening to his breathing.

Finally, he said, "Now maybe you understand." Again, he paused.

"I think I do, but I need to hear you say it."

"You're torturing me."

"Not really. I want you to tell me what's going on with you about this."

"Isn't it obvious?"

"Yes and no."

"OK. I really need to go shopping, so here goes--

"I hated, yes hated, what Trump said at that so-called news conference. He never even served though he went to military school and fancies himself a tough guy. And I wonder how many of those KKK and neo-Nazis served. My guess, none of them. Not that that's the meaning of life. Being in the army. But you can't pretend to be a warrior and hide behind deferments. Trump, I think, had four or five. But that's a distraction--about who served and who didn't. 

"The problem is," Jack continued, "that you can't, no one can, particularly a president cannot say anything whatsoever good about the Ku Klux Klan and especially the Nazis. Nothing. How are the people on TV talking about this? As Morally equivalent?"

"Equivalency. Moral equivalency."

"There is no such thing as that when it comes to Nazis. There's nothing equivalent. Nazis are evil. Anyone calling himself a Nazi today is also evil. It's that simple. Maybe those guys in Charlottesville didn't have anything directly to do with concentration camps and killing Jews. But if you're a self-proclaimed Nazi that becomes part of your baggage."

After waiting another half minute, I posed the really biggest question--"Does that include Trump? Is that also part of his baggage?"

I let a minute pass. "Does it? He's your boy. Whatever he is or isn't, he's yours. You bear some responsibility for him. I mean for his being president."

" . . . "

"I didn't hear you. As I told you . . ."

Jack rasped, "It does. It does include him."

"So what are you going to do?"

More silence.

"I don't know. I still like a lot of things about him, but . . ."

"But what?"

"Like I said, I don't know."

Buchenwald Liberation Photo

June 13, 2014--Guest-Blogger: Father's Day Treasure Hunt

On the Friday before Father's Day, guest-blogger Sharon reports about an interesting and emotional treasure hunt--

I don't particularly like Father's Day.

My dear grandfather died suddenly the day before in 1969.

We all watched from the living room window as someone we couldn't quite see lying on the sidewalk and was taken away. It never entered our mind it could be him. We thought he was at home downstairs in the apartment he shared with our grandmother. The next day, his present remained unopened and was returned.

Almost thirty years later, I was preparing to head up to New Jersey for Father’s Day 1998 when I got a call that my dad had a stroke and my family was at the the hospital. It didn't look good.

Another Father's Day funeral. Another unopened and returned gift.

After my grandfather died, I asked my mom for the few coins my grandfather carried in his pocket for a memento. I later found the pictures depicting my grandparents early life in Russia and later life in the U.S. disappeared somewhere along the way. So when my father died, I scooped up his papers stored in boxes from earlier Father's Day gifts and the recently cleaned Eisenhower style uniform jacket my dad had tried on for us the year before. It fit again.

A pack rat myself, I was curious what I'd find in the boxes. There were greeting cards, a few of our report cards, award certificates and programs from school events. Far more interesting were the papers from the years before he was a husband and father. Inside the aging boxes were various documents and correspondence and a few black and white pictures, which almost sixteen years later I would use to try to recreate a chronology for what my dad did during the war.

This year, the Monday before Father's Day I received a long list of questions from Steven about Joe's WWII service, inspired by the reporting around the 70th anniversary of D-Day. Like me, Steven had tried to ask my father these questions directly without much success. Over the years a few stories would leak out, often the same ones-but no real chronology.

Although I couldn't answer most of the questions off the top of my head, I offered a few things I remembered and then decided to get the box.

We all knew that during the war my dad had appendicitis after Thanksgiving. Initially thought to be indigestion, he ultimately remained in London while the rest of his unit moved on. When I found a program dated November 23, 1943, 106th Signal Corp I figured his illness was so significant that he kept the menu.

But it turned out that GI Joe got sick after Thanksgiving 1944 and found himself in a hospital in England. Meanwhile five days after they arrived on the continent, his fellow soldiers, who had trained together for over a year in South Carolina, Tennessee, and Indiana were to face a battle that would prove too much for inexperienced troops, the Battle of the Bulge.

Although ultimately credited with helping to slow down the Germans, over 500 soldiers from the 106th were killed, thousands were captured and became POWS. Many of these men ended up in Stalag IV-B. Kurt Vonnegut himself was with the 106th and was assigned to a work detail in Dresden. Housed in a former slaughterhouse, his experiences there inspired Slaughterhouse 5. Another site I found detailed the dead by unit. Five men from the 106th signal were listed as KIA.

I've sometimes joked with my siblings that we probably owe our existence to appendicitis. However, until this week, I never quite realized the extent of the horrors my dad narrowly escaped.

Noting that his separation papers in 1946 didn't note the 106th, but the 32nd armored regiment, it appears that the rest of his service was as a Sargent and Staff Sargent, including a platoon leader commanding a tank, which I do remember him saying caught fire on his first day. I found a map depicting the 32nd's route through the Ardennes, the Rhineland, and Central Europe. Two of the three campaigns were noted on my dads' separation papers along with note of a bronze star.

Also noted was a ten-week business course at Shrivenham American University. An article about Shrivenham noted that the business courses were most popular with GIs who, tired of taking orders, were looking forward to becoming independent businessmen after the war.

The other interesting discovery was the Cigarette Camps. On the back of an old black and white photo my dad inscribed, "Camp Pell Mell, Etretat France, October 1945.

Disgusting." A quick search uncovered not the old world classical building he posed before, but a camp of "ramshackle tents in a vast mudhole," where early on soldiers were staged on the way to the front and later the last stop for soldiers who had accumulated enough points to return home.

Why were the camps named after cigarette brands? In addition to obscuring their location from the enemy, it was thought to provide a psychological lift and the inference that cigarettes would be plentiful for soldiers who would soon be sent to the front.

So late Monday night, with still many holes in the chronology, some inconsistencies and with only a Thanksgiving menu for the 106th Signal Corp, I did another search and found images of uniform patches depicting a lion for the 106th and Spearhead for the 32nd Armored. I remembered my father’s Ike-style uniform in the upstairs closet. I removed the cleaning bag and there they were--on one sleeve the Lion patch and on the other the Spearhead patch. They were there when he tried on the uniform, but at the time didn't really mean anything to me. I didn't think to ask.

Now they were confirmation of a narrative I had to piece together from documents and scraps of memorabilia because, in life, like so many others, my dad didn’t want to talk about these life-altering experiences.

So as the world appears to be coming apart again, this Father's Day my gift is the gift of remembrance for my dad and for all the people who sacrificed so much over 70 years ago.