The following is from a new book I'm working on called "Learning to Love My Father":
Pictures of my father from 1944 show a 20-year-old, smooth-cheeked, sandy-haired lieutenant and bombardier pilot with the 8th Air Force, and by that September, he’d completed 19 successful missions in a B-17 “Flying Fortress.” His plane was 27,000 feet above Osnabruck, Germany when he yelled “Bombs away!” and dropped a load of firepower on the industrial targets below. Thirty seconds later, anti-aircraft gunfire hit the B-17’s third engine and flames spread to the gas tanks -- they exploded, instantly killing three of the nine crewmembers. When dad came to, he was at 18,000 feet and being whipped by a 100-mile-an-hour wind, but his parachute was open and he was floating toward earth. He never pulled the ripcord, or at least claimed he never did, convinced that someone moving past had reached out and done it for him. If one believes in miracles, the first one in my life came that day, because without that open chute, I wouldn’t exist. He landed badly and dislocated a hip. Two German citizens came along with a wheelbarrow and found the young American soldier sitting in a cabbage patch, unable to stand up. They tossed him into the cart and hauled him several miles over a bumpy road to a Catholic hospital where his hip was more or less put back in place. When he could walk, they sent him to Frankfurt for a week of solitary confinement in an eight-by-ten-foot room and he was interrogated by German intelligence officers, giving out only his name, rank, and serial number. He was then transferred to a 10,000-man prisoner-of-war camp, Stalag Luft III at Sagan, and there he played cards and waited for mail delivery. Letters from home were his life line and decades later he’d drive downtown to the post office and check the mailbox three times a day, even when he knew there was nothing inside. Food was another obsession. In the camp, they subsisted on meals of stale dark bread and cups of thin soup. Sometimes, he traded the guards his American cigarettes for potatoes or, more rarely, a precious egg. He always said that without nutritional supplements from the Red Cross, many prisoners would have never survived the winter of 1945. His hip had not healed properly and at night the Americans were forced to march through blizzards, as the Nazis kept moving them from camp to camp. With the Allies closing in on Berlin and victory, he finally settled in at Mosberg in Bavaria. One day toward the end of April 1945, he and the other soldiers heard gunfire in the distance -- the approaching sound of General Patton’s 9th Armored Division. At ten a.m. on April 29, Patton’s tanks crashed through the barbed wire fence and Mosberg was liberated. When the Americans ran the Stars and Stripes up the camp’s flagpole, many of the freed soldiers broke down, Patton standing on a small platform to address the ex-prisoners. As they scrambled to be near him and look at his legendary pearl-handled revolvers, the general also began to cry and said, “I don’t mind combat, but I can’t handle this.” Four aides carried him off to his command car and it sped away. That spring dad came home, but the war never really ended for him. He and my mother tried living in a city but dad was claustrophobic and more comfortable in the open spaces of the countryside. He found beauty where others might have seen only an empty landscape -- in the modest rolling hills and the crops that arrived every summer. He preferred the simplicity of a small town and after my sister was born, they settled in a farm community and he opened his lumberyard. I came along two years later and throughout my childhood, the war’s lingering effects were obvious. He was always jittery and dreaded tight spaces. He fidgeted in cars, especially in the back seat with another passenger, waving his arms hard enough to hurt someone. He constantly banged his head against the metal doorframe, the window frame, and other parts of an automobile interior. He hit the steering wheel with his elbows, the dashboard with his wrists, and he never stopped twitching. Late at night, he marched up and down the hallway outside my bedroom, talking to himself in German or humming tunes from the war years. He went out to the backyard, stood behind the tall pines, and shouted people’s names, his voice shivering through the darkness and echoing across the neighborhood like a wild dog’s. When he drank too much, which wasn’t that often, the sounds grew more manic. He’d constantly barge into the kitchen, pulling open the cupboards and searching for something to eat. Twenty years after the fighting had stopped, he was always hungry, particularly at night, grabbing food from the shelves or refrigerator and eating with both hands, not even pausing to chew. I always wanted him to tell me more about his experience in Germany and about the war itself. How did the Nazis come to power? How could a nation let that happen? Why would people give control to a group of madmen intent on killing all the Jews in the world and tens of millions of others? Dad and I could talk about money and sports, about the weather and business at the store, but not about warfare or rage or pain or fear or women or sex. I repeatedly tried to ask him about being a POW in 1944 and ‘45, but he’d just stand and leave the room, so I quickly learned to keep my questions inside or shove them away. I didn’t want to be a coward around my father but I was, both as a youngster and later on, and I couldn’t speak up to him, even when I should have. He’d suffered enough in the war, people said, he was still suffering, and my job was not to upset or disturb him, no matter what he did, so I kept still. We were alike in so many ways -- we looked and smelled similar, we made the exactly same noises when we coughed or sneezed -- and more than anything I wanted him to show me how to become a man and what that meant. But he couldn’t. As a teenager, I stopped wanting to hunt and fish with him or ride with him in cars. I couldn’t understand why he twitched and banged his head against metal surfaces, just as I couldn’t take it when customers came into the Pioneer and swore at him or made threats to his face. Their bills were long overdue and he’d been sending them notes to pay up, but instead of mailing him a check they came into the store and blasted him in person, calling him names. He never talked back or said much of anything, but stood there smiling at his attackers. I wanted to scream out and beat them with my small fists, but dad didn’t seem to mind the abuse, and his strategy usually worked; the angry customers eventually paid their bills, cooled off, and continued trading at the store. By the time I was fifteen, I’d given up hunting and fishing for swigging whiskey from a pint bottle and riding in the back seat of cars going 90 or 100 miles an hour. A group of us piled into Chevys and Fords and the two fastest vehicles paired off to race a quarter-mile to a narrow concrete-and-steel bridge at the city limits. When both cars got there at the same time, which they usually did, metal scraped the bridge railings and sparks flew past the windows, death screeching at us from an inch or two away. Drunk and terrified, I never raised my voice. I wasn’t a coward just around my father. Around that time, a popular local girl became pregnant by a boy several rungs below her on the social ladder; both were sixteen and she had no choice but to marry him. The church and community were filled with gossip about the scandal and at the dinner table one night, my mother insisted dad take me into my bedroom and explain “the facts of life.” Years earlier, I’d watched farm animals breed and ever since then I’d tried to let dad know about this so we’d never have to have this discussion. I knew it would be excruciating for him, but I’d never found a way of conveying this information to him, and now I was stuck. Sitting down next to me on the bed, he folded his hands in front of him, as if he were praying. Most evenings after dinner, he fell asleep on the couch holding his copy of the New Testament with a small American flag on the cover -- the one book he’d had with him in the prison camp, the only book I’d ever seen him read. It was already wearing out from the grip of his gnarled fingers, which were arthritic and twisted from the war. I picked up an odd metallic smell coming from him, an odor I’d one day come to recognize as fear. He knocked his head against the knotty pine paneling in my room and interlocked his fingers together until the knuckles turned white. I looked down at the bedspread and tried to think of something to say. “You know what happened to her, honey?” he asked in the strange, childlike voice he used when miserably uncomfortable. “Yeah.” His shoulders went slack and a big rush of air shot out of him -- a wave of relief. He clasped his hands over his knees. “Good,” he said. “You wouldn’t ever do anything like that with a girl, would you?” “Nope.” He leaned over and drove his elbow straight into the wall, which made a dull pop, like the distant sound of a rifle. “I knew you wouldn’t,” he said. “You’re too good a boy for that.” “Yep.” He stood and started for the door. “Let’s get back to the table. I’m ready for dessert.” I followed him, certain that the issue would never come up again and it never did. I went to bed feeling good that night because dad hadn’t been forced to explain the sex act to me and I hadn’t been forced to listen to him try. There was nothing in the world I wanted more than to be able to relieve my father’s suffering, but I didn't know how to.