Long Night’s Journey

It must have been the longest night of my father’s life.

My dad was a veteran and I grew up hear his stories about fighting in World War II.

These stories were frightening, tragic, and occasionally funny and I never tired of hearing them.

There was this one time when he was trapped in a foxhole during a lengthy attack.

The shells kept on falling and my father had nowhere to go, so he was forced to take cover in this wet, filthy hole in the ground all night long.

I can’t begin to imagine how terrifying that experience must have been, to be trapped in the freezing darkness while the whole world blows up all around you.

When the sun finally came up and the explosions ended—for the moment, anyway—both my father’s feet were so badly frostbitten that he couldn’t walk.

A pair of medics eventually showed up, loaded him onto a stretcher and began taking him to the nearest field hospital.

As they walked the artillery fire started kicking up again. The two medics panicked, dropped the stretcher that was carrying my father, and jumped into a ditch on the side of the road—leaving my dad completely exposed.

These two guys were pretty green and they didn’t realize that the artillery blasts were outgoing and heading in the enemy’s direction. My father was an old hand by then and he knew exactly what was going on.

The two medics climbed up out of the ditch, picked up the stretcher, and resumed carrying my father back to safety.

Walk On

Once again, the cannons roared and once again these two medics dropped my dad’s stretcher on the side of the road. When they dropped my father a third time, he let his feelings be known.

“That’s our artillery, for Christ’s sake!” he shouted. “If you see me get up off this stretcher, then you’ll know we’re being attacked!”

The medics got the message, straightened up, and took my father in for treatment. I always laughed at how my father lambasted those two medics, but to be honest I can’t say I blame those guys all that much.

An explosion is an explosion and I would imagine that you have to survive a number of them before you’re able to figure out the details.

But what kind of price do you pay when you go through repeated artillery attacks?

We’ve had plenty more wars since that time and the weapons have gotten more horrific.

The soldiers get a ceremony on Veterans Day, but eventually governments find another reason to go to war and we have a whole new generation of scarred survivors.

I remember watching a documentary about World War II with my father one night. The film included newsreel footage of several GIs taking a break from the fighting.

“Look at their eyes,” my father said. “You can see that they’ve been through shelling.”

I looked but I can’t really say that I saw anything unusual about these men. Now that I’m older, I’d like another chance. I’d like to look into those tired eyes one more time and maybe get an idea of what my father saw.