My father and his wartime Band of Brothers
My father never talked much about the war. In his view, there was never much to say.
He’d done his part and with luck returned home to marry a small-town girl named Jean and raise seven children.
He didn’t see himself as any hero.
He was just an average soldier, barely out of high school, who brought home neither wounds nor medals.
But I do remember this: My Dad never bad-mouthed the Germans, those men he’d fought against. That just wasn’t in his nature. They were soldiers just like he was, doing a dirty job they’d been told to do.
Recently, I have taken a deep-dive back into those trying times my father faced. I’m watching Steven Spielberg’s 2001 war-drama series Band of Brothers, ten episodes of horror based on the 1992 nonfiction book by Stephen E. Ambrose.
What Spielberg shows us in Band of Brothers, as he did in Saving Private Ryan, is that World War Two veterans lived in terror and died unspeakable deaths, and that even average soldiers like my father performed the deeds of a brave generation.
Band of Brothers has been called the most realistic series ever produced about war. I had escaped military service entirely, too young to get swept up in the dragnet of Vietnam, so the is the closest I will ever get to experiencing the hell of battle.
But my father was there. He answered the call when it came.
As I watch, I only wish that my father, who died in 2014 at age 92, was still here by my side, so I could pose all those questions I never had time to ask.
I want to know more about all those relationships he’d formed under fire.
About his own band of brothers.
Watching Band of Brothers takes you to war.
You feel the frozen ground of Belgium in mid-winter, the dumb violence of an exploding mortar, the whizz and sing of passing rounds.
You become part of the easy teasing of boys who’d been unceremoniously forced into a man’s boots, and quickly learn how getting any degree beyond high school puts a soldier under suspicion.
You see how newcomers aren’t accepted until they themselves dodged bullets, running like hell under fire on a mission nobody wanted to go on.
And you learned exactly what a GI would do for a cigarette.
Eventually, you become part of that almost spiritual connection that soldiers make while surviving for years under fire.
Twenty five years ago, on the 50th anniversary of the war's end, I interviewed my father for a newspaper piece.
That day, in his eyes, I was more reporter than I was son, so he answered my questions, told me things for the first time.
He served in the Army’s field artillery branch–anti-aircraft corps. He did his wartime work in North Africa, France, Italy, Belgium and Germany.
Shipping out to Casablanca, he met his first wartime friend. Crossing rough seas, Nick from New York City was so sick he couldn’t leave his bunk.
Nick said he wanted no more ocean crossings; he’d rather die over there.
He did.
One winter night years later, after their battalion had stormed the beach at Anzio, two dozen soldiers had found shelter from the rain in a rundown chicken coop in the Italian countryside.
Nick and my father playfully argued over an old blanket and spent most of the night pulling it back and forth as they slept foot-to-foot. As soon as one man was still, the other would swipe the blanket.
“Finally, I said ‘Aw, Nick, go ahead and take it,’ ” recalled my father.
Hours later, a German shell struck the shack. In the ensuing confusion, a medic grabbed my dad and told him to search for survivors.
Going man to man, my father’s flashlight finally revealed the old blanket, torn to shreds by flying shrapnel.
Nick’s body lay beneath it.
During his time in Belgium, my father fell in love with a young woman who lived in a village nearby where he and his men were camped for weeks after routing the Germans from the area.
Her father told him that he saw a troubling difference in the American soldiers and the Germans they had replaced.
The Germans, he said, came to town in groups, got drunk, and left in groups. While the Americans also arrived in small clutches of men, there were always loners who peeled off at some point during the night.
Those, he said, were the dangerous ones.
In one scene in the final episode of Band of Brothers, Easy Company listens as a captured German general gives a final speech to his deflated men.
They are heartbreaking sentiments, forged in battle, meant for both sides.
“Men, it’s been a long war, it’s been a tough war,” he tells them. “You’ve fought bravely, proudly for your country. You’re a special group. You’ve found in one another a bond, that exists only in combat, among brothers. You’ve shared foxholes, held each other in dire moments. You’ve seen death and suffered together. I’m proud to have served with each and every one of you. You all deserve long and happy lives in peace.”
Decades later, as my seventy-something father sat on a park bench in Florida, a man about this age, who could have fought in the war, asked if he could share the spot.
He spoke English with a thick German accent.
“Es ist mir egal,” my father answered, “It doesn’t matter to me.”
The man nearly embraced him, wanting to connect, but my father admitted that it was the only German phrase he knew.
After the war, my father kept in touch with a few of his battle buddies, then slowly let the relationships slide.
Later, telling war stories to his grandchildren, he portrayed himself in a humorous light, a member of a gang who couldn’t shoot straight.
But on one vacation to Italy, my father announced that he wanted to take the train to Anzio, to find a man he had yet to tell me about.
He wanted to visit Nick’s grave.
We didn’t find it. A sudden downpour chased us into a local restaurant, where we ate pasta and said little.
The war was over.
For the average soldier, life went on.