shouldazagged
Absent Comrade
SEVENTY-THREE YEARS AGO TODAY my father was a nearsighted, 4-F (physically draft-exempt, for you younger folks) war correspondent. I have grandkids older than he was, but he was so "old" the young GI's called him "Pop".
He had crossed the North Atlantic in winter of 1943, the storm season, aboard a flat-bottomed LST, an ungainly ship that would roll on a damp dishcloth. He landed in England to prepare to cover the Normandy Invasion.
On this day, all those years ago, he went ashore on Omaha Beach, the most heavily contested and deadly of the invasion beaches. He landed with one of the first units in the first wave, an engineer outfit tasked with preparing the beach for the units to follow. On the way in he had an amphibious vehicle shot out from under him by a German artillery piece.
He was one of the thousands of men pinned down at the foot of a bluff and sea wall, every inch of which the Germans had sighted in with massed machine gun and artillery fire.
Like most men who were there, he would rarely say anything about it, and then very little. Mostly he would only admit that "It was pretty rough."
I was glad that when he died at ninety he had never seen the opening minutes of "Saving Private Ryan". He would have recognized that grisly as it was, it wasn't as bad as the real event; but it would surely have taken him back to the horror.
Dad went on to a distinguished career as a journalist, including major overseas assignments. Then he retired from that and entered the ministry, retiring three more times.
But at the end of his long life, if you asked him what his occupation had been, he would square his shoulders and proudly say, "War correspondent."
I hear people say, "They don't make them like those guys anymore." I beg to differ. I believe we do, and they would answer the call if we needed them on that scale. The kids who called my young father "Pop" were the same ones old timers had criticized for being soft, disrespectful and irresponsible. Older generations have always said such things about the young.
The "soft, disrespectful, irresponsible" boys my father watched dying in droves as they fought their bloody, costly way off the beach were the ones we call today "the Greatest Generation".
There is a lesson there for us old timers.
He had crossed the North Atlantic in winter of 1943, the storm season, aboard a flat-bottomed LST, an ungainly ship that would roll on a damp dishcloth. He landed in England to prepare to cover the Normandy Invasion.
On this day, all those years ago, he went ashore on Omaha Beach, the most heavily contested and deadly of the invasion beaches. He landed with one of the first units in the first wave, an engineer outfit tasked with preparing the beach for the units to follow. On the way in he had an amphibious vehicle shot out from under him by a German artillery piece.
He was one of the thousands of men pinned down at the foot of a bluff and sea wall, every inch of which the Germans had sighted in with massed machine gun and artillery fire.
Like most men who were there, he would rarely say anything about it, and then very little. Mostly he would only admit that "It was pretty rough."
I was glad that when he died at ninety he had never seen the opening minutes of "Saving Private Ryan". He would have recognized that grisly as it was, it wasn't as bad as the real event; but it would surely have taken him back to the horror.
Dad went on to a distinguished career as a journalist, including major overseas assignments. Then he retired from that and entered the ministry, retiring three more times.
But at the end of his long life, if you asked him what his occupation had been, he would square his shoulders and proudly say, "War correspondent."
I hear people say, "They don't make them like those guys anymore." I beg to differ. I believe we do, and they would answer the call if we needed them on that scale. The kids who called my young father "Pop" were the same ones old timers had criticized for being soft, disrespectful and irresponsible. Older generations have always said such things about the young.
The "soft, disrespectful, irresponsible" boys my father watched dying in droves as they fought their bloody, costly way off the beach were the ones we call today "the Greatest Generation".
There is a lesson there for us old timers.
