Love and Fury

by Richard Hoffman

  Because I am a father, and because both my son and my daughter are older than my father was when he was so grievously betrayed, along with a critical mass of his generation, by his century’s savagery; and because my grandson’s father, Jamaican-born, black, along with a critical mass of his generation, is in prison, I think about these things—and even about my father’s life—more from a paternal than a filial vantage. And because I am a grandfather, I do my considering more from an ethical if no less personal angle. I hope to see my grandson become a young man; I hope to help raise him to adulthood. I’m sixty-one as I write this, not very old for a man of my generation, but there’s no guarantee.

  I look at this photo of my father and I see my son’s face, not mine, although sometimes I glimpse my father in the mirror these days. My father is younger in this photograph than my son as I write this, but I see they have the same mouth, the same tight smile, a little crooked, as if always just about to make a wisecrack. They have the same round cheeks, the same tamed curls, the same jawline. In the photo, I see a boy, not a line on his smooth face. I wonder if he even needed a razor.

  He’s in a uniform, pressed wool, crisp lapels, brass buttons. A medal dangles from one flap pocket. This must have been on the occasion of his completing basic training, or jump school.

  There is no fear in this young man’s eyes. He knows, of course, that he is going to war. And there’s nothing of the posed hardness you sometimes see in such photos. His face is open, proud as a kid on his first-communion day.

  And it is only viewing the photo this time that I am able, for the first time, to detach myself enough from his gaze to notice that in the lower right-hand corner he has written:

  To my parents,

  Dick

  I was Dick Jr. growing up. Or Dickie. I could say I always hated it, but that’s not true. The teasing started in about fifth or sixth grade. Friends would call and my mother would ask, “Do you want big Dick or little Dick?” Once I remember playing cards on a rainy Saturday: war, or maybe crazy eights, with some friends on the living room rug. My mother was on the phone nearby, evidently talking to an old friend she hadn’t seen in some years because we heard her— we all heard her—exclaim, “And you should see how big my Dick has grown!” Cards flew through the air! I wasn’t exactly secure at that age, and I couldn’t join the hilarity. My friends, having witnessed the hot shame and stifled anger of my response, did their best the rest of the afternoon, but they just couldn’t help themselves. Now and again a snort would escape somebody and that would set everyone laughing again while I stewed. “Come on, just play the game! It’s your turn.”

  In Stephen Ambrose’s introduction to David Kenyon Webster’s Parachute Infantry, he quotes Paul Fussell: “It can’t happen to me. I am too clever/agile/well-trained/good-looking/beloved/tightly laced, etc.,” to ever get hit. After a few hours or days or weeks of combat, that attitude gives way to: “It can happen to me, and I’d better be more careful. I can avoid the danger by watching more prudently the way I take cover/dig in/expose my position by firing my weapon/ keep extra alert at all times, etc.,” then comes the realization that “It is going to happen to me, and only my not being there (on the front lines) is going to prevent it.”

  I don’t believe my father’s denial system was sufficiently developed for him to have experienced that “It can’t happen to me” phase. His brother Francis was already a Nazi prisoner by then, his survival depending on his ability to prove he was not a Jew. It was late in the war, although it was uncertain how long it would go on, and my father had known any number of other young men who had lost their lives.

  My father’s personality was shaped by that war, by his sense of himself as a soldier. During his final illness, late into a hospital stay of several weeks, when he began to experience some nighttime dementia, as older people often do when hospitalized, his delusions turned on the theme of warfare, of having been captured. He’d tear out the IVs, leave his room, and creep down the brightly lit halls to the door, all three hundred pounds of him, in nothing but a hospital johnny. Discovered, he would fight the nurses, repeating, “I have to get back to my unit! I have to get back to my unit!”

  So what does it mean that, according to my research, he was in a unit that never saw combat?

  It was my father’s good fortune in World War II not to be sent to the front. When two-thirds of his division, the 515th, was transferred to the 82nd and 101st divisions for the Normandy invasion, his orders were to remain with the 515th at Fort Benning, Georgia. There were not enough planes to transport all of them. The 515th would be part of a later assault to be launched against the Fuhrer’s bunker. After a short time in England, they were sent to France, to Le Havre, where they received the order to parachute into Germany. However, ground forces moving up from the south were more successful than expected, the jump was deemed unnecessary, and the order was revoked. They returned to the United States to prepare for the invasion of Japan. That August, the explosion of the atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki obviated the need for the 515th.

  Luck: I’m haunted by the fact that I would not be here if it weren’t for these circumstances. There’s no making sense of it; in fact, it drives home the point that we are all accidents and the result of accidents, luck. My brothers Bob and Mike were afflicted with muscular dystrophy. I was not. Nor was my brother Joe. To argue that there is a reason, unseen but glimpsed, in the events of history, is self-serving foolishness. To argue that we can’t see the reason because we are the reason is to turn reason on its head and insist that the world exists only as the instrument of our narcissism. Our metaphysics cannot rest on solipsism and self-congratulation. Humility, it seems to me, ought to be considered the highest virtue since only humility, knowing that one’s good fortune is only that, good luck and nothing else, makes possible whatever clarity can be had. Luck, not superior strength, wisdom, agility, intelligence, or virtue. Luck. Assertions to the contrary are suspect to me. There may be untruths we need to tell ourselves, but they are nonetheless fictions. Don’t be fooled.

  I think that some part of me was disappointed to find that my father was never in combat. Outrageous to feel that way, I know, but war propaganda shaped the world I was born into, and the remnants of that orientation, like the boots, helmets, ammo cases, belts, and uncharged grenades at the Army/Navy store, the surplus, the accoutrements of war, shaped the aesthetics and ethics of the people who raised me.

  The Army/Navy store was on Seventh Street near Sears, Roebuck, where somebody had used tar to draw a strike zone on the blond brick wall so we could play fastball in the parking lot on Sundays and in the early summer evenings, except for Thursdays, when the store stayed open until nine.

  All that gear, all that surplus, the rubber gas masks, the cargo belts, the canteens, the collapsible shovels, the hard-toed high shined boots, the woolen olive sweaters, the helmets and soft caps, even the badges and medallions, were not, it occurs to me now, used things left behind when peace was declared. They were provisions for a war that ended soon after the first atomic bombs were dropped on Japan, equipment for a war that would now be play-acted by pubescent infantries in the woods and fields behind the church and school.

  I held my father in awe because he had been a paratrooper. He had a yearbook, something like a college yearbook, from jump school at Fort Benning. The inside covers front and back were the same glorious photo of a sky filled with pearly silk parachutes, so radiant in sunlight that it surprised me years later, as an adult, to find that the photos were black-and-white. His dog tags, shoulder patches, ribbons, and regalia were sacred things to me, although my father kept them in a tangled heap in his junk drawer. Among my father’s tools, downstairs in the cellar, there was his bayonet: a long knife that slid from a hard sheath, an object of masculine wonder. A ring on the handle would have clasped it to the barrel of a Browning automatic rifle, called, simply, a BAR. “Fix bayonets!” was a command we were all familiar with from TV and movies, a command that
meant, “This is it!” Or “Here we go!” There would be no mercy, the combat would be at close quarters, bloody, and to the death.

  The bayonet was grooved and sleek. There were faded stains on it: rust or blood? What was it my father said when I asked him? He always put me off when I asked about the war. For a while I convinced myself—in the absence of any information from him—that he kept it because it had saved his life: there were many scenarios for this fantasy, all of them borrowed from TV and film.

  In one scene my father has just parachuted into a field at night and crawled past a French barn. His presence, flat against the side of the barn and then as a shadow among cows tethered close together for the night, sets off a commotion among the cows, goats, and chickens that brings a German sentry for a look. There is a way, I know from the films and from my Attack Force and Sergeant Rock comic books, to kill quietly, stealthily, so as not to alarm anyone. My father steps from the shadows, and with this very bayonet, he slits the man’s throat so cleanly that he cannot cry out.

  In another fantasy my father is in a foxhole and has time only to raise his BAR quickly to a priapic angle as a bestial German soldier throws himself upon what he thought was my father’s sleeping form.

  Oh, there were plenty of these. One even involved my father throwing the magic blade—whoosh—so that a Nazi grabs at his chest, a shocked look on his face, and falls, just as he was about to do some foul thing I didn’t fully understand to a tiny French girl. This is, of course, impossible; bayonets were not made to be thrown, the balance would be off, the hilt much heavier than the blade.

  Another fantasy scene from boyhood, again from the movies: my father is on his belly crawling across a minefield. I can see the beads of sweat on his frowning brow—courtesy no doubt of a close-up of Sergeant Rock’s square-jawed, deeply shadowed face—and he’s gently probing the ground in front of him, the blade of the bayonet inserted again and again at an acute angle. “Tick.” The sound of metal on metal. He reaches over his shoulder exactly the way an archer would reach for an arrow, and withdraws a small red flag on a wire he places in the ground to mark the mine’s position. The rest of his unit is waiting and watching from the edge of the wood, anxiously, while he risks his life to find them safe passage from the trap the Germans have sprung on them. He crawls forward again, proceeding by inches, probing and flagging. When the Germans arrive at dusk to demand their surrender, trapped there in the wood, they will be gone.

  No doubt somebody could chart these notions across the filmography of the fifties. Maybe I ought to do it, now that almost all of it’s been put on DVDs. But that would be beside the point. The imagery, the action, the violent conflict of good and evil, were lodged inside me, along with the wish for a set of circumstances in which to prove myself heroic.

  When we played war in the fields and woods behind the school, I was allowed to wear the bayonet’s green scabbard, almost the length of a sword relative to my four feet of ferocious fantasy, but the bayonet was forbidden and, in fact, disappeared for many years, no doubt as a result of my unhealthy and dangerous interest in it. Later, as an adult visiting my father, I was rooting around for a pair of pliers in a drawer in an old wooden chest in the basement, and there it was, not much the worse for wear except for the broken tip, and the entire romance came back to me: the World War II movies with my father in the starring role. I asked him, again, why he still had it. Surely he’d confide to his fifty-year-old son what he could not or would not tell his ten-year-old child. “What? That damn thing? I don’t know. Last time I used it was to cut ceiling tiles for the upstairs bathroom.”

  Most of my friends’ fathers had been to war. One of our neighbors walked with a kind of hop, another with a cane. A man across the street wore a sock on the stump of his arm and once joked with us that he’d wished they could have found his arm; he wanted to put it under his pillow for the arm fairy. “What do you think I’d get for that?” That was the bitterest laugh I’d ever heard. Some were like the guys in the movies who jumped on a grenade to save their friends, only they jumped on a bottle of beer, curled around it, and it slowly exploded over the next twenty five or thirty years while their kids, who saw them as irascible losers, were spared the worst of what they might have suffered had their fathers enacted with full force the violence they brought home with them instead of hiding out at the American Legion or the VFW. Sometimes the grenade was not a bottle of booze, just a sucking emptiness, a black hole, an insatiable maw. “You don’t want to know,” they kept saying. They meant, “I don’t want you to know. I don’t want you to have to know.” Where is the memorial to those guys? What would it look like?

  At the Army/Navy store my father explained to me what each shoulder patch, arranged in cubbyholes like a postman’s sorting rack, stood for. They were all beautiful to me, tough as carpet and woven into brilliant colored designs: the ones I could already recognize, such as the 101st Airborne’s screaming eagle, or the 82nd Army Airborne AA on a blue circled red field. And the many others my father knew: the maroon and black of the Blackhawk Division; the 66th Infantry’s black panther on a gold field; the 63rd, the Blood & Fire Division, a bloody sword against a background of flames.

  It was there in a dark and narrow aisle in the back of the store that my father explained to me the beautiful practicality of the paratroopers’ jump boots. He held up a pair, black and smooth as polished onyx, the long tongue a deep royal blue on the inside, toes shined “so you could see your face in them” and reinforced eyelets all the way up, no buckles or even the slightest protrusion on them anywhere, nothing on which the strings of your chute could catch. He caressed the boots, smelled them, held one to my cheek, “feel how smooth.”

  They had none in my size, barely a man’s size, only a pair of infantry boots, part leather, part canvas, with the double buckle around the ankle, and he bought me those although he seemed to disapprove of them somehow, the boots of the foot soldiers, not the sleek and smooth leather that made paratroopers stand out.

  I knew from the division’s yearbooks, which I pored over constantly, that trainees wore high-top Converse sneakers until they were given, with much ceremony, and after successful completion of their training, their very own jump boots, which each man kept polished and well oiled to keep the leather supple.

  “You get a blister, it could slow you down. You could get killed because you didn’t take care of your boots.”

  I took this all in. The world was a dangerous place but one could take precautions. Lucky for me—and I felt it, felt grateful—I had my father, who shared what he had learned with me. He would keep me safe if I followed his directions.

  When we could not play war with our canteens and utility belts and helmet liners and Frannie’s dead grenade that had been turned into a cigarette lighter; when we were not shooting at each other or crawling across the ground on our stomachs, sliding our wooden bayonets into the ground at acute angles, inching our way forward through imagined mine fields, covered in branches and leaves for camouflage; when it was raining, our mothers yelling, You’re not going out there you’ll catch your death of cold!—we played war indoors.

  First of all there was the card game, the simplest card game we knew: flip over one card at a time and the higher-valued card wins. If two cards of the same value were turned over, you had a war: one card down and the other would decide the battle. When the battle was decided, you turned over the first card to see what you’d won—you never knew, it might be a high-value card that would help in the next war, maybe not. In any case, the game was over when total victory had been achieved: one person had all the cards.

  Another indoor war involved our “army guys.” Everybody had a bag of hard green rubber soldiers for these wars, and the bag included not only soldiers standing, sitting, or lying on their bellies shooting, but also tanks, trucks, artillery, and tiny machine guns. Indoors we perfected the sounds of the weapons: rifle fire, machine guns, explosions, as we knocked over the enemy’s soldiers who, once deploye
d, could not retreat.

  Everything about that postwar boyhood was colored by the war that had just ended. What our fathers would not tell us we imagined, and Hollywood was there to help. As soon as the sun came out we headed for the battlefield with its foxholes to dig, its trees to climb and snipe from, its boulders to take cover behind.

  What we could not tell one another but what I believe we all felt was that we were playing with death, playing at dying. After all, we were told, daily, that another war was imminent, and that this time there was little chance of survival. The communists had their missiles trained on us and those mushroom clouds in the photos of Japan would soon be pillaring upward on our own horizon as they had already done again and again in our nightmares. Besides, killing was merely hitting a target, like an icy snowball clanging a street sign or the satisfying thwack of a spongeball in the strike zone. Killing wasn’t the mystery; dying was the greater challenge to the imagination. You’d cry out, stagger, fall as dramatically as you could muster. Then you could lie in the grass and be more silent than you would ever otherwise have any excuse to be, high grasses arching over you, leafhoppers of neon green crisscrossing your vision, a sky of ozone blue above you as you lay there trying to ignore the itch of a bug on your neck, feeling the boredom setting in, hearing the shouts and calls and play-acting of your friends nearby.