The World War II Stories I Shared With My Father

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/07/magazine/world-war-ii-stories-d-day.html

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This week, At War published an article about Ernie Pyle, the journalist whose dispatches from the front changed the way Americans thought about World War II, especially after the D-Day invasion on June 6, 1944. Pyle died in April 1945, but his impact on war reporting would be felt for generations to come.

Pyle and his legacy got me thinking about how I came to understand World War II and the killing and dying that it spread the world over.

I read books about World War II growing up. A lot of them. It was the 1990s, a decade of relative peace, and I started because my father — a Swift boat veteran from the Vietnam War — read them fervently. He died when I was 19, a few weeks after I shipped to Marine Corps boot camp, so I can’t ask why he liked them so much.

My father and I traded books back and forth. A lot by Stephen Ambrose: “Band of Brothers,” “D-Day,” “Citizen Soldiers,” “Pegasus Bridge.” We both read “Once an Eagle” by Anton Myrer and “Flags of our Fathers” by James Bradley and Ron Powers. The list goes on.

I always liked getting the first pass at a new book we were both going to read because I knew the pages were clean. My father had a habit of lying in bed and eating this peanut-butter candy called Mary Janes, a throwback treat from his youth that I think Cracker Barrel still sells, as do a few old-timey corner stores scattered around the country. But his reading-and-eating habit meant that the page corners would quickly develop a sticky brown residue that would glue entire chapters together.

I don’t remember my dad reading any books about Vietnam. He didn’t talk about it much either. The only two stories I can really remember of his time there are about when he got malaria and when he stole a trash-can-sized tub of ice cream from a destroyer in Cam Ranh Bay. My mother said he walked out of “Apocalypse Now.”

So I didn’t read about Vietnam either. Just the Greatest Generation and the Good Fight they fought, to free the world of tyranny and all that. After a while the books all started to blend together. Soldiers fighting and dying for one another. Stories of unvarnished heroism. D-Day, the Atlantic Wall, Pointe Du Hoc. Nuts! in Bastogne.

The show “Band of Brothers” premiered on HBO on Sept. 9, 2001. My grandmother taped it for me. I was ecstatic. My dad and I had both read the book, twice I think.

Two days later, the towers fell and the Pentagon burned. There was a crater in a field in Pennsylvania. A lot of people died. As I watched the news that night, something was burning in Afghanistan, a blob of fire filmed through a night-vision lens. My Good Fight had finally arrived, I thought.

I was 13.

D-Day in Photos: Heroes of a More Certain Time: As the number of surviving veterans dwindles, the old pillars of trans-Atlantic certainty have begun to tremble.

‘Saving Private Ryan’ Got My Dad to Finally Talk About the War: War films may have been only “based on a true story.” But they did justice to the essential truth of what happened on the ground.

Their Fathers Never Spoke of the War. Their Children Want to Know Why.: Seventy-five years after D-Day, families of World War II veterans are turning to professional researchers to piece their stories together from military records.

‘Archaeology of D-Day’ Aims to Preserve What the Soldiers Left Behind: For the past 10 years, a cadre of field researchers in France has been digging up, documenting and cataloging the physical remains of the Normandy invasion.

Pentagon Ends Review of Deadly Niger Ambush, Again Blaming Junior Officers: Military leaders have struggled over how to apportion blame over the deaths of four American soldiers amid family members’ demands to hold more senior officers accountable.

V.A. Prepares for Major Shift in Veterans’ Health Care: The Department of Veterans Affairs says it is ready for a major shift in access to private care, but veterans groups and lawmakers are concerned.

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