Sunday was more like Memorial Day. Father’s Day calls my father to mind, but WWII was one of the most defining events in his life.
Just a farm boy from Nebraska, hardly 18-years-old, he served in the Army’s 89th Division and shipped out for the third wave of landings onto the shores of Normandy.
He saw a lot of action. Carrying a high quality German camera, he took a lot of pictures of the war. None of them pretty.
When he returned home, he had a lot of shrapnel embedded in his flesh. Many years later, when he’d started a family, contributing to the baby boom, he had to go to the VA hospital several times to take some of those pieces of metal out from under his skin as they began to resurface.
As I grew older, his experiences and stories of war fascinated me. And the shrapnel that took so many years to surface again now remains as a memory and a metaphor.
As my father advanced in age and then learned that his days were numbered, like the resurfacing shrapnel, he began to remember his combat experiences. That’s when he talked about it more than ever.
Since then, I’ve written a novel mostly based on a character similar to my father, though, placed in our modern times and circumstances.
War is war no matter the time or the generation. Soldiers return home and try their damnedest to forget. Only the self-proclaimed gung-ho soldiers, the ones who dance around in flight suits for photo ops…only they are eager to talk of war.
Eventually, combat experience comes back, they haunt the soul. I remember how my father often woke up from nightmares. All his short life, he suffered from narcolepsy caused by combat.
Mojave Winds is a novel in which its main character, Kris Klug, is a young man returning home, looking for job and faces calamity while readapting to the civilian world.
Mojave Winds, though, is partly a memoir about my father, despite the time that’s lapsed. It’s in honor to him.
Both photos by soldiersmediacenter via Flickr
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