Father's War

I don’t remember father well.  He died in 1965 along an old dirt road that led to a farmhouse standing among the foothills of Oregon’s Coast Range.

As  a child I’d climb on a chair to reach the top drawer of a tall dresser, dig to the bottom of the clothing there, then carefully examine the medals someone once handed him.  I didn’t know what they meant, other than that mother had told me they  were important.

Decades later my younger brother found a photograph of father taken as he recovered from the physical wounds  the war inflicted.  He had been part of the European horror show of the early forties - the one so many didn’t survive.  Father didn’t survive it either.

There’s an old charcoal drawing that looks like a black & white photograph.  The image is the face of a beautiful young woman.  It’s dated 1945.  My oldest brother  was born to the woman not too long after the portrait was drawn.  The man she married looked much like the actors women liked to look at in those days - tall, dark hair, lean and rugged.  In another image the man is atop a great horse with his oldest son (young then) sitting behind him.  I always wonder who took the photograph and if there was any way they might have seen into the futures of these two people.

You see, father didn’t really come back from the war.  It changed him, tormenting him until the end of his life.  There was an article in Friday’s newspaper about widespread alcohol abuse among the troops fighting contemporary wars.  I guess it’s a way to cope that doesn’t seem to work so well.  After the war father struggled to realize the fictitious family popularized on television in those days, but reality was much, much different than the shows.  In 1965 I found him “sleeping” in his car, parked along the dirt driveway leading to the old farmhouse.  The car was running and warm inside, the radio playing a soft country ballad as a hard rain loudly struck at the exterior.  The carbon monoxide flowing from the exhaust  to a wing window had brought his war to an end.  But the war didn’t end for his four sons, or  the broken-hearted woman who tried so valiantly, finally failing to survive.  Only the boy behind the man on the horse would take his own life, but everyone fell in one way or another.

Wars are sometimes inevitable, but never to be taken lightly.  They pass through generations.  The people who fight them usually aren’t the people who started them, although there are exceptions to most things.  I’m proud of father for his courage standing before the evil that engulfed so much of Europe during his time.

I only wish there had been another way.