Sunday, May 27, 2018

Going Home (A Memorial Day Tribute)

Twenty years ago I flew from Alabama to New York to spend a week with my father.  I had made the trip with a specific objective, to find out more about his years in the 82nd Airborne during World War II, specifically the 325th Glider Regiment.  The time was rich, sitting at the kitchen table, recording his voice, reading old letters and looking at pictures mounted on the worn, black pages of an old photo album.  He pointed at an empty space on one of the pages, the corner mounts still intact. He told me the name of the soldier whose picture had occupied that spot at one time and continued, "He was captured in the Bulge on Christmas Eve and died in a prisoner-of-war camp.  His parents contacted the captain while we were in Berlin and I gave him this one." I wondered how many others were there that he knew that never made it home. 
      
There sits on our of our bookshelves a long, framed picture of a few hundred soldiers taken on October 31, 1942 at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.  It was taken a month or so after my father had arrived to begin his training. Less than a year later they would be in Europe, combat-ready.  Normandy came first.  One day I asked him to point out to me where he was in that photo, so hard to pick out in that sea of men, all in uniform.  As he pointed to a much younger version of himself, he said,  "Many of them didn't come home." He was quiet after that.   


This picture was taken at Fort Bragg on October 31, 1942    
                                                 
Recently someone asked me if I knew where my father was in that photo.  It had been such a long time since I had looked that I had to admit I no longer remembered where he stood. But this week as Memorial Day approached, I thought of him and determined that I would search the photo and find him again.  Two days ago I ran my finger over each face, row by row, looking into the eyes of every man,  peering out from that place and time 75 years ago. I wondered if they had any thought that day of what was ahead for them, about the possibility of not getting home after the war was over.  As for my father, I found him towards the last, I mostly recognized him by his eyes.  I  was grateful that he'd made it home.  

My father standing in the third row, second from the right 

In one of his last letters, written just a couple of months before returning to the States, he penned the following: "I will get home.  Some never will.  But they're not forgotten, at least by the boys that were there with them."  We can't, we mustn't forget them either.  I owe it to my dad.  We owe it to them.  Every last one.