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.

My gosh, those two guys could talk cars. In the fifteen minutes it took to tow my car to the mechanic’s shop, they went through Lincolns, LTDs and their equivalent, the Chrysler Newport, Javelins, Gremlins, Pacers, Firebirds, Pintos, ’57 T-Birds, Mach 1 Mustangs, and also Mach 2. I sat between the two of them, my feet on the jumper cable booster pack. “That booster pack might give you a jolt,” Rob, the driver-in-training, joked. Scott, behind the wheel, was from Maine. He had the accent and stories about cars he’d known there. Of how a guy had taken his wife’s new Firebird to a race track and entered a race for amateurs. How another car’s tire blew out, sideswiping the Firebird. The Firebird leaves the race with dents all over it, and the engine with less than 200 miles on it. “Not even broken in,” I said. “A crime.” said Scott.

Just eighteen months ago, she’d watched her husband ride his horse across the face of the moon. It was a daylight moon, setting full but faded in the southwest, pausing on the ridge top long enough for the man and his horse to pass in front. From a distance, she watched the crown of her husband’s Stetson graze the moon’s north pole, its orb framing his entire torso, the southern regions eclipsed by the horse’s body. Then the mare carried him beyond the moon, and a minute later, man and horse dropped from sight behind the ridge.

Maybe he’d noticed her, maybe he hadn’t. His eyes weren’t so good these days. When they went out to count cattle, he could make the animals out as brown dots scattered across a pasture, but his counts were off. He’d come to rely on hers. “I got thirty four,” he’d say. “What’d you get?”

She could have blown the horn to get his attention. Even if he couldn’t see as far as the road, he’d have known the sound of her truck’s horn, sensed trouble, and ridden down from the ridge. On the other hand, having seen her man ride across the moon seemed to make it worth the five mile walk home.

The moon tagged along behind her husband, loping down behind the ridge like a lost calf being led back to its mother. When the three of them were out of sight, she lingered, in no hurry to get home. Hood up, driver’s door open, she sat absorbing the silence of the rangeland, enjoying the strong slanting gold of the late afternoon sun, a woman alone on land half hers, behind the wheel of her very own truck, with a pint of Seagram’s and six seized cylinders.

When she figured there was just enough daylight left to get her home at sunset, she capped the whiskey, left it on the seat, and set off walking. Galen would beat her home, and he might be worried she wasn’t there, but her story would cheer him up. He’d be going around for days telling everyone he knew how him and Gertie had ridden across the moon. Galen was dying of cancer, but he still liked to laugh.

*

The day Galen went, he went quickly, resting as best he could with a tube down his throat and two more up his nose, with wires and other tubes poking into him and running off him like his body was nothing more than a house being rewired. She sat beside the bed in the dim light, thumbing her Smartphone, skimming emails from grandkids. She looked up, sensing a change in him, like something unseen was welling up from his insides. A breath rattled softly from his lips. She thought she heard him mumble, “Come to me,” and then he was gone. She laid her phone on the nightstand, let go a breath of her own. Her eyes ran down his long, emaciated body. She’d never felt so strong, knowing she’d seen him through. Under the thin hospital sheets, she knew he was already little more than a skeleton, but he’d fought for every pound he’d lost. That day, frail and dying, he’d never seemed stronger, fighting the cancer, one last time, to earn himself the night time, so he could die at rest.

She did not call a nurse, one would come by soon enough. She switched off the only light, a bedside lamp. Moon light filtered through the partly closed blinds, falling across her husband’s withered face. She reached with hesitant fingers not so much to touch him, but to touch the moonlight that lay gently on his cheek. “You’re too late,” she said, “but it was nice of you to come.” Then she apologized because, of course, it had been with them all evening.