I have another reason for telling you his story. I also want to honor my father’s memory. Despite the way the war changed him, I will always love him. My family has a treasured photo of his youngest great grandchild, Alyssa Piatak, standing next to his gravestone. The epitaph we chose for Dad reads: “Gone But Not Forgotten.”
That’s the truth. We all loved Robert Marsh dearly.
Man of the House
Robert Marsh was the youngest of seven children. His father had been married previously and had lost his first wife and baby in childbirth. His father was studying to be a doctor at the time, and when he couldn’t save them, he sort of lost it emotionally, decided he wasn’t going to be a doctor, and gave up on life. He married a different woman, my grandmother. They had seven children, he worked odd jobs and became a drinker.
Their son Robert, my dad, quit school when he was in the eighth grade so he could take care of his parents. They needed help even then. Dad worked at a little store on Pennsylvania Avenue in Columbus called Nick’s Food Market, about a block from where he lived. The older brothers in the family did their own thing. The two girls got married and moved out of state. Dad was the softy of the bunch and became the man of the house. That good-person side of him, the caring part, was always in him. It was certainly there from the start.
Dad enlisted at age seventeen. He lied about his age to get in. Two of his older brothers had been drafted into the Army already. Dad was in the Army a total of two years, eleven months, and eight days. We heard that statistic quite often while growing up.
I was three months old when Dad went into the army, and three years old when he got out. He was just seventeen when he was married, and my mom, Jean, was eighteen. Dad had been long out of school by then. They met through friends. He asked her out, but she didn’t like him at first. Mom was a quieter person and described Dad as an “out there” type of guy.
Dad joined Easy Company at Fort Bragg before the unit shipped out for England and further training prior to D-day. I have a letter written in 1981 from Easy Company member Burton Christenson, who notes:Robert K. Marsh was a member of first platoon. During [D-day, he] injured both legs and was hospitalized in England. He returned to duty with his unit in England and succeeded in making every battle campaign the 101st Airborne Division participated in until the Germans surrendered May 8th, 1945.
Marsh could have been evacuated because of his injuries and sent back to the United States.
Sergeant Marsh was and is a credit to his country. A real man’s man and a great soldier.
I love that last line. It points to the man my father was at the core, a credit to his country and a great soldier. That’s how I want people to remember him most.
The bad part is Dad always had a hard time believing those good things about himself. He was mentioned in Band of Brothers a few times, notably in Hagenau. The book notes how Sergeant Marsh was driving a German truck as Private John Janovic leaned on the truck’s door. The truck hit a log and Janovic lost his balance. Tragically, he was thrown to the road and died from the concussion to his head soon after.15 It was a very sad post-hostilities accident, and yes, my dad blamed himself. That’s one story we heard about in bits and pieces throughout the years. Dad said he even killed his own. Others said Janovic’s death was an accident. “Well, you don’t make those kinds of accidents,” my dad said.
When Dad got out of the Army, my mother and I were living with his parents. Dad wanted us all to stay with them for a while because it was easier to take care of them if we were all together. We stayed with my grandparents until my mother decided she didn’t want us to be there anymore, then we got our own house. My brother and sister were born after that. There are six years between my brother and I, and eight between my sister and I.
Dad worked at the General Motors factory in Columbus for many years, then went into the tavern business with my mom and my uncle. That was a mistake because Dad drank from the time he returned from the war until the day he died. What he didn’t drink at the bar he gave away for free, so the business didn’t work from a lot of perspectives. My uncle eventually bought them out, and my dad went to work at other jobs.
Dad’s work ethic was always one good thing about him. He never missed a day’s work. He never took anything from anybody. If he felt he needed something or wanted something, he worked for it. That’s what he always told us: “You work for what you want and don’t expect anybody to give you anything.” He always provided a home for us. And we never went hungry.
Though he worked all week, he drank all weekend. It was always just beer, never whiskey or anything. People seldom think that beer can be dangerous, but it is if you drink enough of it. Dad drank Pabst, and he could really put it away. An eighteen-pack was no problem for him. Friday nights, he wouldn’t come home until late and he was drunk then; sometimes he wouldn’t come home at all. On Saturdays when he woke up he started where he left off. He was drunk all day Saturday. On Sunday he sobered up for work on Monday, and then we better all walk the walk, because he wasn’t in a very good mood when he was sobering up. That happened pretty much every weekend. That was life as I knew it.
He was very strict with me. If I didn’t dry a dish correctly and he found a spot, it didn’t matter what time it was at night, everything came out of the cabinets and I washed and dried them all again before I could go to sleep. I always tried to do whatever I could for him. I got him his beer or whatever he needed. But I never could please Dad.
He was very strict with my brother, also. If we did something wrong as kids, we had to stand in the corner at attention for up to an hour. We couldn’t move, and if he caught us moving, our time started over. I don’t know if you’ve ever had to stand one place for very long, but if you have an itch somewhere, or you need to move a foot—well, Dad better not catch you. It could be two minutes before your time was up, but if he caught you moving, your time started over. My brother got caught several times like that. I remember him literally falling down in the corner, asleep. Then my mom and dad would get into it, because Dad said he had to stand there, and Mom said, “That’s enough.”
Dad talked when he drank, and it was all about the war, but everything was in riddles. You never knew the specifics of what happened. He mumbled and shouted and cheered, often talking about the different guys in the company. It was all good, what he said about the other men. They were his heroes. I heard their names so often I thought those guys were related to me: Winters and Guarnere and Christenson and Lipton and Martin. They were my surrogate uncles. Christenson was a really good man in my father’s eyes. After I was married and became pregnant, Dad wanted me to name the baby after Christenson, if it was a boy. But I ended up having three girls.
Dad talked frequently about how he should not even have come home from the war. In his mind, the best men were buried over there. A few people referred to him as a war hero, but we didn’t dare use that word around the house. That was wrong. “I am not a hero!” he said. I know other vets who express similar things, but with Dad it wasn’t so much about humility as it was about self-loathing. Everything he did was bad in his eyes. He talked highly of the other men, but whenever he talked about himself, he was the bad guy. He lived with so much guilt. It seemed like he was proud to know that he was one of those great men who fought for the country, but he was in denial about any of the good parts he did.
I remember saying to him once, “Dad, everybody had to do terrible things when they were over there. You could have been killed.”
“I should have been killed,” he said.
That was his take.
We never went on any family vacations. Dad wasn’t big into creating fun memories. But he loved to cook. That made a good family memory. He was proud of a few dishes he made—spaghetti with pork chops, meatloaf—and they truly were great. After I got married we often went there for Sunday dinner with the whole family. That’s the one time everything wasn’t so much about the war. It was about his cooking then. But those few mom
ents of peace didn’t happen often enough.
When Dad drank, he sometimes talked about himself as if he wasn’t in the room, detached, in third person: “He killed people. Those hands killed a lot of people, and do you have any idea what it’s like to have killed?” The questions were all asked in anger. One of his friends got blown up in a foxhole, and he mumbled about that often: “Do you have any idea what that was like? To have body parts all over me?” The more he talked, the angrier he got.
When he was drunk, he set up an American flag in the middle of our dining room floor. If you came in the front door you couldn’t walk through the house to get to the stairways to go to your room. You better not come near the flag unless you saluted it.
One time he was drunk and tore up our house badly. I was about ten years old and sure, I saw him in this rampage. He went from room to room breaking things. I hollered and screamed. My mom tried to get him to stop. I ran to a neighbor’s house to call the police. They arrived, and Dad ran out the back door. I’ll never forget the two officers’ astonishment. They looked at the debris and let out a low whistle. “Wow, what happened here?” an officer asked.
“My husband,” Mom said. “He was telling war stories.”
“One man did all this?” the other asked.
Nothing was standing in our home except the refrigerator and stove. Every piece of furniture was tipped over, ripped, or broken. The mattress was off the bed. Chairs were on their sides. The dresser was knocked over. Our entire house was torn apart.
Dad talked about committing suicide. He attempted it once by trying to hang himself in the basement. He was drunk. When Mom went down to see what he was doing, he had a rope over the rafters and around his neck and was standing on a crate. Whether it was just a show, or if he would have actually done it, who knows? Mom didn’t.
When I was a kid I never understood why Dad was like this. I don’t fully understand it today. I’ve read books and I’ve talked to a few of the veterans. That’s helped, but I think, wow, Dad really needed help. Nobody knew where to go or what to do. I sure wish we had.
Always in Misery
For years I begged Mom to leave Dad and get us out of there, but she kept saying that she wanted us kids to grow up first. Finally in 1964, they divorced. Mom had put up with enough. I was twenty-one and out of the house, but my brother and sister were still teenagers at home.
Dad remarried around 1980, but I don’t think he ever got over my mother. He always talked about Mom, even in front of his new wife. When Dad remarried, he didn’t seem as bad as he had been. He was this way through the last twenty years of his life. But he continued to drink, and it was still always about the war, and always about something bad he had done and couldn’t forget, and he was always in misery.
Did he need to sense forgiveness? Probably. That, and he simply needed to talk. He needed to make the decision to seek help. He needed to reconnect with his friends, but he wouldn’t, and we couldn’t make it happen for him. Mom was a Methodist, and we went to church when we were young, but Dad never went. He believed in God, I know he did, but he didn’t participate in anything like that. He didn’t participate in much of anything.
His friends from the 101st had reunions, starting right after the war. Dad never went. He got mail all the time asking him to come, and he’d tell us he had heard from Winters or from Guarnere. But he never went into much detail about the letters, and if you asked him, he wanted to know why you wanted to know. “Well, why do you care? What do you want to know for?” That was his attitude.
In 2003, Dad was pretty sick by then, he told me about a reunion coming up. They all wanted him to come. He gave me the date and times.
“Dad, why don’t we all go to this,” I said. “I would love to meet these guys. I’ve heard about them all my life.”
“Nah, I’m not going,” he said.
“Why?” I asked. “It’ll be a good thing.”
“Well, maybe I’ll think about it,” he said.
I called and got in touch with the guy putting it on that year, Ed Shames, and he knew right off who Robert Marsh was and helped set up everything for us.
But when it came down to it, Dad refused to go. We went ahead and went without him, me and my husband and kids. For the first time at that reunion, I got to meet some of these guys I had heard so much about all my life. We talked a little bit about my dad. They didn’t say a whole lot. I met Bill Guarnere. He’s just a fantastic guy. We’ve kept in touch on and off since then. It made me cry to think he literally begged Dad to come to these reunions for so many years. I really think it would have helped my dad to have done that: to connect with the people who had gone through the same things he had gone through, to talk to them and deal with the war, rather than it being his own private thing his whole life.
I know that going to the reunion helped me, just being able to talk to the guys and see them up close. It helped just for what I lived through. And I didn’t go through the war, obviously. But it helped me understand the war more.
I read Bill Guarnere’s and Babe Heffron’s book. I’m not much of a reader, but reading it really helped me, too. I needed to shut it every once in a while because of tears, just visualizing what the men—what my dad—went through.
Last Years with Dad
Dad wouldn’t talk about any of his health issues with us. As he grew older, I went with him to the doctor whenever he let me. One of the first times, the doctor had my father take his shoes and socks off and pull up his pant legs to his knees. My father’s feet and legs were black. I looked in shock.
“You’ve never seen this before?” the doctor said to me.
“No.” I didn’t know what to say, other than “What happened?”
The doctor looked at my dad and said, “Oh, so you hide yourself well.”
Dad let his pant legs go back down. “It’s from the war,” was all he said.
Dad hated snow. He hated Christmastime. Those were some of the worst times over there, I guess. He had gotten frostbite on his legs and feet during Bastogne. The doctor told me that dad was still lucky that he had his feet.
After Dad retired, the government couldn’t find his records and told him he had never been in the war. “Never been in the war!” You talk about someone who was mad then. Still, he didn’t want us to know what he was feeling. “Humph, I don’t care,” was his only response.
He didn’t have any amount of money or insurance, so he started going back and forth to the VA. He had no other choice. They kept telling him there were no records, but finally they relented and started to give him medicine.
The government got things straightened out. I don’t know what level of disability Dad finally received, but it was the least amount possible. That made him even madder. They started sending him checks, amounts such as $1.60 a month. It was an insult, Dad said. He wasn’t cashing them, and he wasn’t returning them because “it wasn’t worth the trouble.” We kept a photocopy of the highest disability check he ever received. It came in 1997, for fourteen dollars.
Dad found out he had an aneurism in his stomach and needed surgery. He didn’t want to have it done. We all had to coax him. He ended up in Dayton at the VA hospital. They did the surgery, and that’s when they found the cancer. Three days after the surgery, he got on a bus by himself and rode back to Columbus. He wouldn’t stay at the VA hospital. He didn’t want anything from them, he said. He chose not to do anything about the cancer.
My mom passed away in 2004. I spent a lot of time with her before she died. I loved her a lot and miss her a great deal.
In July 2005, things started getting really bad for Dad with the cancer, and he grew very frail. He soon became too sick to say or do much about anything. Hospice people came; they took him to Grant Hospital, here in Columbus, and got him settled. There was a mix-up between nurses and other family members about whether to give him medication or not, and when I arrived, my dad was in so much pain, I could hear him from down the hall. He was screaming, “Let me
die, let me die, let me die.”
He had signed me the power of attorney over his health. We got him some pain medication. I just wanted him to die in peace. Dad started relaxing. In a while he was calm. After several more hours his breathing was different. You could tell he was ready to go.
He passed away later that day, July 30, 2005. I was with him in the hospital room, sitting near him at the bottom of the bed. My sister was sitting beside him holding his hand. I watched him take his last breath. The first thing that came to mind was “My dad’s no longer fighting a war.”
Letting Go
I deeply miss my dad now that he is gone, but what I really miss is the man my dad could have been if not for the war. I’m just comforted with the fact that he is finally at peace, no longer fighting a war. I don’t think my dad ever lived the kind of life he wanted to live. I think he gave his life for his country while he was still overseas, and when he came home, it wasn’t really him. He fought the war from age eighteen to eighty-one, and he never let that war go.
He had always talked about being buried in Dayton National Cemetery for veterans. We got him a beautiful casket. It was for a soldier and had parachutes and flags on it. They held a military funeral for him with a twenty-one-gun salute and military honors. He had what he wanted. Those honors are what he deserved and needed to have. Getting my dad into Dayton National Cemetery brought a measure of peace for me. I felt like it ended the way Dad wanted it to end.
I do know he had a good side. He didn’t want anybody to know about it, but he cared about all of us in his own way. When I think through his life, I see now that he was so young, yet he had to grow up so fast. At age fourteen he was working to help support his mom and dad. At seventeen, he was a soldier fighting to defend his country. At twenty-one, he was taking care of a wife and child as well as his parents. How I wish things could have been different. I can’t imagine what he went through. We all handle things differently, and sometimes we don’t understand how our actions affect other people. Maybe my dad didn’t understand, either.
A Company of Heroes Page 14
