That brought back so many memories. I;m so glad you have those letters.
My mother kept all my father's letters from the war-- he spent four years away, most of them in England-- and she typed them up in volumes, one for each year, that I now have. They are very precious to me as he died when I was I just 24 and I never really knew him as a person. I think parents remain parents until you are one yourself, or til you experience more of life apart from them.
He didn't talk much about the really awful parts of the war, but wrote about the funny day-to-day things. ( I am very much my father's daughter.) My mother even had one published in the town newspaper about a bunch of them going to a bullfight in Mexico while he was training in West Texas. They were so appalled at the brutality that he and his buddies began cheering for the bull and calling the matador Hitler.
My father was a very funny man, the kind of person everyone loved to be around. He was sacrilegious and disrespectful, but as honest and honorable a man as any I have known, including my almost perfect husband. Between the lines of those letters there is so much loneliness and emotion that it is painful at times to read. People appear and disappear in his letters with little detail except for small comments like "We lost Joe last night."
My boys never knew my father, as your children never knew yours, and so this one small gift we can give them of their heritage.
I think I wrote about one incredible evening a year or two ago, when my father-in-law, who left a leg in Normandy, had an evening of clarity and talked about the war, about being shot twice and lying in a ditch for hours, pretending to be dead until he was found by fellow Americans, hearing the sounds of battle around him. Ammo was there and when we left that night, I started to say something to him about what a special thing that was, and he stopped me and said, "I know, Mom. I'll never forget this." |
