PERSONAL PERSPECTIVE : World War II Non-Talk: Tragic Loss of Meaning

I was born in 1952--seven years after World War II ended. My father had been a sergeant in the Army in Europe. My sisters, brother and I knew this much and almost nothing more.

We knew from a photograph my sister kept on her bureau that he looked dashing in uniform--our own Clark Gable, we thought. We knew he had done something brave during the war to help a man named Eddie, who showed up at my parents’ important parties and moved with an awkward stride--as if clearing a hurdle every other step. Finally, we knew that once my father slept so soundly through a bombardment that he awoke, alone, to find the walls of the building gone and his buddies in hiding.

It seems extraordinary to me now that we didn’t know more. When I look back seven or eight years, no important event of my life seems so finished that it would not show up in ordinary conversation. And yet, for my father--and for a whole nation of young men--the thing was done and put away. My father never spoke of the war all the years I was growing up--except once or twice to tell the tale of the bombing raid to illustrate, jokingly, how soundly he could sleep.

Memories are conveyed in families through channels that are obscured over time. I don’t remember who told me that my father played a selfless part in the incident that cost Eddie his leg. It was probably Eddie, who was sentimental and would call my younger sister and me to his side, at least once a party, to tell us our father was a man to be proud of.

Once, while sitting at my parents’ desk, I came across a photograph of a mansion, isolated on a mountaintop, with its windows missing and a couple of U.S. soldiers posing in front. Someone, I don’t remember who, told me it was Hitler’s summer retreat and that I should put it back.

I was filled with curiosity about this photograph. How did a snapshot of a house belonging to Adolf Hitler, our mortal enemy, end up in my parents’ desk? How could Hitler live in a ruin? Who were the GI’s? But I didn’t mention it to the rest of my family, or tell my Dad I’d seen it. There was a tacit agreement that we would leave this material where my father had put it--out of our lives.

Gradually, the unmentionable became the unremarkable. We grew up thinking that being a soldier in a war was an ordinary aspect of fathers’ lives. They went to war and came home, just as once, before we knew them, they had been flirts or college men.

In the 1950s, we lived in a new suburb and went to a newly completed elementary school where many children had dads who had been in the Army. If I had been asked, I would have said that even though there was not a word of the war in “Father Knows Best,” Mr. Anderson had been a soldier.

It must be that having my two sons did something to reorder my thinking. If I still feel unfinished in many ways, I feel adult and clearheaded when it comes to understanding the impermanence and dearness of life. It is now impossible for me to think of the war in Europe--the landings at Normandy, the prolonged battle in Belgium in the winter of ‘44-’45, the moments of horrible fear, the killing--as an ordinary episode in a young man’s life. I concluded recently that I would never understand how the war affected my father if I didn’t get the facts--at least some of them--from him. So I asked him to sit for an interview. The idea pleased him. So we recently spent two days together, recording as much as he wanted to say about being a soldier in World War II.

He discussed the nitty-gritty of Army life easily, and I began to think I had imagined his silence. I loved hearing his story of crossing the Atlantic on a great passenger liner so crammed with soldiers that he and his shipmates spent all their waking hours on line for food. His tale of how the Third Army transported and appropriated sleeping quarters for tens of thousands of soldiers each day on its rapid march through France was suspenseful, dramatic, even funny.

But if I had not pressed him, I would not have found out that, as a sergeant in an artillery observation unit, he routinely went behind enemy lines; that he had to lead his men around German patrols; that, crouching in a foxhole, he watched a man 20 feet from him blown to pieces by a shell; that he stood nearby as a soldier, trying to deactivate a grenade, blew himself up, and that he carried Eddie, babbling and semiconscious, to a field hospital.

A few times in my lucky, safe, American life, I have watched something terribly traumatic--and in reaction have become irrepressibly talkative. I recognize this as one method for coping with the dislocation that fear and distress sometimes throw at us. This quest for normality my father and his generation undertook after the war could well be another.

I try to imagine how it would feel to put something like combat completely behind so that, within a few years, I could raise children as if nothing unsettling had happened. My father and the men of his generation showed unusual strength of character as they returned to civilian life and took up their lives and responsibilities. But I wonder whether they, and we, paid a price as yet unacknowledged.

In my father’s case, the price may have been a kind of loneliness. My mother says the only time she saw the side effects of war in my father was when a sudden, percussive noise made him duck. He didn’t talk about it. Listening to me describe the interview, my mother heard his war stories for the first time.

For my brother, sisters and myself, the price was small and manageable: He held something vital about himself back, making it harder to know him, harder to take the full measure of his appetite for life.

For the nation, though, the impact of so many men returning in silence may, ultimately, have been a dumbing-down of our national judgment. We mistook the veterans’ willingness to put the war behind them for a sign that the whole enterprise had been as glorious as Life magazine said it was. Unable to come to terms with the reality of combat, no matter how good the war, we approached the next two and a half decades as if complexity had been drained from the world. Fifty years is a long time for a nation to live isolated from the firsthand realities of a war. Had we known more perhaps we would have proceeded more ably in a world filled with ambiguity.