These are my father’s war stories, the only ones I know. He didn’t talk much about it.

 

 

 

Before shipping out to Europe, Jack took part in maneuvers in Louisiana. His company was bivouacked in the swamps. Some men found a six foot rattlesnake and killed it. They cooked the snake, and other men helped them eat it. That night, lots of men slept in the trees.

 

 

 

Jack was a farm boy from Kansas, and rural Kansas was all the world he’d ever known. He said he never had any trouble with blacks, but the toughs from New Jersey and New York City were mean and dangerous, and he stayed away from them.

 

 

 

Jack decided that whatever happened, he wasn’t going to walk across Europe. He signed up to take a test to become a truck driver, joining a long line of GIs that stretched up and over a hill. Every few minutes, they heard a loud crash of crumpling metal from the other side of the hill, and the line would advance a step. Reaching the top of the hill, Jack saw one truck parked nearby, pointed downhill, and at the bottom of the slope, a pile of wrecked trucks. He was told to get in the nearby truck and drive it to the bottom of the hill. The noncom who gave this order did not tell him that the truck had no brakes, but Jack found that out for himself when he pressed the pedal and it went to the floor. He’d grown up driving old clunkers of trucks on his dad’s farm. Keeping the engine in low gear, he eased his way down the slope, and brought the truck to rest well short of the crunched-up pile at the bottom. That was the whole test. Apparently, knowing how to brake with the engine was enough to earn a man the privilege of driving to the Rhine, passin infantry men slogging through the mud.

 

 

 

Jack was part of the D-Day landings, but came ashore several days after June 6, after most of the fighting was over. Jack took a walk down the beach. He came to a dead G.I., lying face down in the sand. With the toe of his boot he turned the body over. The face was the face of a man he knew. He didn’t know why he’d turned the man over, but he never did it again.

 

 

 

He drove his truck in long convoys, single file on narrow twisting roads, blacked out, the headlights giving off the faintest glow. He drove as close behind the truck ahead of him as he could, because it was the only thing he could see. Out one window of his cab, he knew there rose the sheer face of the invisible mountain. Out the other, he sensed nothingness, a sheer drop who knew how far. He kept his eyes straight ahead and drove.

 

 

 

Jack had a way of befriending men who didn’t fit in with the others. One of these was Freddie, a fellow with a compulsion for rummaging in the pockets of dead Germans. On one body, Freddie found a packet of papers that turned out to have valuable intelligence. For a while, Freddie was a hero, but that wore off, and he went back to being the weird guy who went through the pockets of dead men.

 

 

 

Freddie took to riding in the passenger seat of Jack’s truck. One day, the convoy they were part of came to a fork in the road. No one knew which fork to take. Freddy snooped around, looking at marks in the dirt. He pointed down one fork and said, “The Germans went this way, two or three hours ago.” That was the fork Jack took. The rest of the men ignored Freddie and went the other way. Jack and Freddy never saw those trucks or the men that rode in them again.

 

 

 

Another time, Jack came to a rickety bridge and started across. Part way over, the bridge began to collapse, and the truck started to fall. Jack jumped out the driver’s door, and his buddy, maybe Freddie, maybe someone else, jumped out the other. The truck toppled in the direction his buddy jumped, landed on him and killed him. Jack was unhurt.

 

 

 

Jack told the story of a corporal assigned to driving a jeep for a bastard of a colonel. Coming to a meadow, the officer ordered the corporal to pull over. “To get where I need to go, I have to cross that meadow,” he told the corporal. “There might be land mines. You go first.” The corporal crossed the meadow, turned and called back, “All clear, sir.” “Good work, corporal,” said the colonel. Part way across, the colonel triggered a mine and was blown apart. The colonel was a large man. The corporal was small. The corporal didn’t know whether he was lucky that day, or just light.

 

 

 

One night Jack was assigned with other men to stand guard behind a barricade on a paved road in a forest. If they heard the enemy approaching, one of them would switch on flood lights and they would open fire. They listened in the dark for hours, hearing only crickets, then heard footsteps in the distance, approaching. The forest, pressing close on either side, magnified Jack’s fear until he was sure there were 10, 20, 30 Germans walking into their ambush. On command, the switch was turned, drenching the road ahead of them in light. Ten yards away, five cows came to an abrupt halt.

 

 

 

Honorably discharged, Jack sailed for home on a hospital ship, sick with yellow jaundice, a disease that affects the liver. “I don’t know you from Adam,” a doctor told him, “but I’ll say this. If you want a short life, start drinking, because your liver won’t stand it.”

 

 

 

He told me his war stories when I was nine or ten, except the ones about Freddy and the troop ship, which he told my brother, I’m not sure when. I didn’t hear the one about the body on the beach until my brother told it to the minister, the day before Dad’s funeral in 1999.

 

 

 

The stories are brief, vivid, unembellished. No guns are fired, no one is a hero, no one is a villain. They are stories of individuals who make choices and are judged by chance. A snake is found, a body turned over, the wrong fork taken. Thirty Germans become five cows, Jack jumps one way, his truck falls the other, and all of them the consequence of a young man’s choice to drive, not walk, across Europe. By the time we heard his stories, he’d had over 15 years to cull his wartime experiences. Maybe he only told stories about the kinds of experiences he could make sense of, suppressing the rest as too senseless to comprehend.

 

“I guess it just wasn’t my time,” he said at the end of one story. I think that is the sum of my father’s war stories, not just the ones he told, but also, and even more so, the ones he didn’t.