I was seven when my father volunteered to serve as a chaplain in World War II. I might have been too young to understand what "war" meant or who Hitler was, but I do remember the feeling that it was something awful and that my father might be taken away from me. I can still see him standing beside our car, saying his goodbyes to us as my mother drove away from the army base in Florida. We were going back to Louisiana, and he wasn't coming with us. I didn't know it then, but it would be almost three years before I would see him again. I would be ten.
That was July 1942. For the next three years my dad served as a combat chaplain to the same unit of front-line, combat engineers (20th/1340th/1171st Combat Engineers) in North Africa and Europe. For most of those years we never knew where he was, only learning after the battles were won or lost where he might have been, based on that familiar "somewhere in..." that was written in the upper, right-hand corner of his letters. The only exception was during those months leading up to D-day when he was allowed to tell us that he was staying with an English family. After the war ended, he returned home, and like most WWII veterans, he never talked about the tragic details of the war, only about the men with whom he had served and a few funny stories. But, was he ever proud of those young engineers!
The only time he broke that silence about the reality of the war followed an incident that occurred several months after his return. We had just stepped out of our car in front of where we were living, when, what we later learned was a small, private plane, crashed into a building down the street, resulting in a loud explosion. Without thinking, my dad flattened himself on the driveway in a defensive position. My mom, brother, and I were standing there not knowing what to think. He was embarrassed, and as he stood up, brushing the dirt from his clothes, he said that he was sorry if he had frightened us, but it had been a "gut reaction" to the explosion because it had reminded him of the war. It wasn't until years later that i was to learn the significance of that incident.
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