A Man I Knew Well, Yet Didn't Know

The Boston Globe

All I have are two stories. My mother told me one many years ago, and my father's brother told me the other in 2005 shortly after my father died. My father told me nothing. His entire life, he refused to talk about the war.

The first story my mother shared when I was 10. I'd discovered an old cigar box full of letters addressed to Nina and Jeannine and Martha and Gladys and Hazel written in my father's big, distinctive script tucked away in my mother's bureau drawer.

I had no business looking through her things, but I did and when I brought this booty to her it was with curiosity, not contrition.

"Your father used to write poetry and love letters for soldiers in his platoon," she explained. "They saw he could write and asked for his help. He was like Cyrano de Bergerac." That's when I learned that my father had fought in World War II.

After my father died, his brother told me about the day he had joined the Army. It was the summer of 1941. Europe was at war, but the United States wasn't yet. "Your father woke me up and said, 'I'm 18. I'm going to enlist.' I got dressed fast and went with him to the Marine recruiting office. But they wouldn't take him because he had flat feet."

The Army wasn't so picky. They accepted my father and shipped him off for training that same day. "I had to go home and tell our mother that Larry wasn't coming home."

That's all I have, these two tales.

And yet, my father took me to every movie Audie Murphy ever made. Murphy was a decorated war hero who played a cowboy in most of his films. Except for one. In "To Hell and Back," he played himself, a kid-turned-soldier who fought the Germans with everything he had and received almost every medal the United States gives.

My father talked often about Audie Murphy's courage and fortitude and sacrifice and allegiance, a word I had to look up in his unabridged dictionary. But he never talked about himself.

After he died, his wife presented me with a red, three-ring binder. On the cover, in bold print are the words: "World War 1942-1945 European Campaign. General Eisenhower." Inside are pages full of names and places — North Africa, Sardinia, Nice, Mannheim, Berlin, and pictures of these people and places — Army buddies and pretty girls and cities still standing and Berlin turned to ash. Who took these pictures and how did they survive the war? And if they meant so much to my father, why had he never shown them to me?

I look through this book and am always struck by how little I knew this man I knew so well. He lived a lifetime before I was born. He fought a war when he was still too young to vote. He was 18, 19, 20, 21, marching, ducking, sweating, shivering, dodging bullets and God knows what else, day and night, for four years.

This was his college education.

And yet he never talked about it.

I visited The National WWII Museum in New Orleans last week. It's a sacred place. I touched an Army-issued uniform, the kind my father would have worn. I held the kind of rifle he would have carried and lifted the 68-pound haversack that he strapped on his back for 2½ years as he trudged through North Africa and Italy and France and Germany.

And in every film I watched, old newsreels and amateur shots, hundreds of thousands of frames found and archived, hell documented and now preserved, I searched for him, hoping to get a glimpse of him — the boy he was, the boy I never knew.

But of course I didn't because there were so many millions of boys.

Audie Murphy was only 19 when he received this country's highest military decoration, the Medal of Honor. He came home from the war a hero, lauded and respected. But he slept with a loaded handgun under his pillow for the rest of his life.

I study a small picture of my father standing alone on a deserted, bombed-out street, buildings crumpled all around him. "War Torn Germany," he wrote.

I called him Dad. But he was so much more.