This piece was penned after Pap left us. He never got to read it, obviously, and it is a tribute to him, and members of the Fighting 159th Combat Engineer Battalion. Without them, without Pap, this book, a longtime dream, never would have come to pass. They and hundreds of thousands of other soldiers fought, long and hard, so that you, and I, may live-hopefully making the world a better place.
The very first memory I have of Pap takes me back to the day he came home from World War II, which to my thinking, was really the very first day in my life that had any real, hopeful meaning.
Thanks, Pap and all those who endured for our freedom. Wish you were still here, but in a sense, you never will leave…R.I.P.
Many of us served our country in a time of peace. We then, are the fortunate. For it’s beyond the mind’s ability to vividly imagine how disturbing it would be to look a man in the eyes, then fire eight, thirty-caliber bullets into his writhing body; a total stranger…
However, in a sense, that’s what a letter to countless Americans said they’d been chosen to do at the upstart of World War II. My father, as perhaps countless war veterans, could no doubt close his eyes and visualize every word in the frightening invitation?
Dad was but 22-years old when that letter beckoned him with strange words written only “between” the lines: “Go to this strange land and fight for your country.” He had no enemies there, but his country did. And so, being a patriot to the very core and loving the unique American way of life, he left.
Dad, whom we later called Pap, like others who served in our nation’s war efforts, must have experienced a great deal of despair and emotional discomfort and confusion. That is going to a land of strangers to fight them? Men, then the enemy, whom he may very well have befriended otherwise, perhaps breaking bread with them or hunting the whitetail in a friendlier forest…
I was around nine-months old when Dad handed me in my blue wrapping to my mother, then boarded the big ship for the European Theatre-give or take a hamper full of dirty diapers. Too young to know I should be crying at his leaving. Too young to realize his chances of taking me hunting on my 12th birthday were, at very best, slim. And I feel Dad wasn’t too shallow of mind and heart to vividly understand he was headed for a Hell on Earth; a place that may swallow his young vibrant body, to never spit it out.
Grandfather told me once-upon-a-time, Dad’s last words to him were, “I’ll see you, Pap. I love you very, very much. And I’ll be back to hunt those swamp pheasants and rabbits with you, so please, don’t worry…” Both wept according to Pap’s account. He didn’t tell me this. I could just tell, for those times he and Dad spent hunting were times when they’d felt better than Life normally allowed. But, of course, when Dad left for the war, those precious times were on the very edge of Never Again.
Dad hit Omaha Beach on “D-Day”. He’d received some 5 bronze battle stars and a few other combat commendations. In a terrible battle where his outfit was grossly outnumbered, he lost buddies who had their rabbit hunting days terminated by indiscriminate Nazi bullets. He fought in the Battle of the Bulge, Bastogne, the Ardennes and other major campaigns. A battle on Hill 313, he once told me, was one of his worst nightmares. He never really spoke of it, but a book dedicated to his outfit did. The odds against his small outfit being victorious in that battle were tremendous. Outnumbered greatly, their chances seemed, at best, hopeless. But, they won. They suffered but three casualties. One, a first lieutenant from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Herbert O. Leckman, or “Big Moe” as his men called him. Dad was called “Little Moe” and their outfit was referred to as “The Fighting Moes” of the 159th Combat Engineers.
I asked him about Hill 313 and all he said was, “…that was a tough one, Joey.” Dad and I talked mostly of hunting rabbits and pheasants and whitetails; the war was long over. He was home now.
Once, while we sat at the edge of a woodlot, I asked him a question regarding the war and his part. He never looked at me, but just stared straight ahead into the shady woods, seemingly caught up in his deep thought. He then revealed the story of a time when he’d shot his first Nazi soldier. It was as though he needed to set the thought free? A sort of therapy? I listened intently as he spoke softly, knowing from past accounts that his confirmed kills numbered some three-digits, so why then, I thought, would he choose to tell me of a single, first kill?
“I carried an M-1 Garand then, Joey. It held a clip of eight rounds. We were out on re-con patrol one early evening and I spotted the German soldier standing against a tree which had a big “Y” just above the main trunk. His helmet silhouette gave away as being the enemy. He was smoking a cigarette, and when he put it to his mouth and drew from it, I place the sights right behind the glowing ash and cut loose. All eight rounds.”
I never saw Dad look quite like he did that day. Never before saw his eyes tear. He continued his story: “Just as I was about to touch off those rounds, he turned to look me square in the eyes. It was the most hurtful thing I ever had to do. In battles, like Hill 313, you don’t really see much, ya just shoot and hope and pray. No eyes looking back at you. Anyway, we were trained to search all enemy bodies, which I did with this youngster I’d just killed, and in his wallet were photos of him, his wife and two little girls. Together in that photo. Hell, Joey, that man wasn’t any different than me. He, too, was there to do a horrible job, something neither of us really understood. Anyway, Son, that was my first time. And now you know. There just wasn’t any satisfaction taking that man’s life, that woman’s husband and worse, the little girls’ father. None. It was just a case of me or him, nothing personal about it…”
I shook my head as if to understand. But there’s just no possible way of understanding something like that, that hurtful. For me or for my father.
Dad told me many times that all he did over there was try to stay alive and to bring his squad back home. He wanted to once again walk quietly through “needle-fine autumn rains” hunting with his father. He talked of how vividly he could remember while overseas, the laughs and times they shared while hunting together. “I knew,” he said, “I just had to get back home. No matter what it took and God, my constant foxhole companion, saw to it that I did…” I was grateful, too, for it gave me a chance to share many wonderful days in the hunting fields with a father. Some kids weren’t so fortunate…
Sometime before I was old enough to hunt, Dad bought into a Potter County, Pennsylvania hunting camp. The county’s slogan being: “God’s Country: the Whitetail Capitol of the World.” He hooked up with a bunch of Greensburg, Pennsylvania cronies; dear friends, most of them. There were the Morelli’s, the Rosatti’s, the DiPrimio’s and, of course, the Parry’s-the Americanized name for “Parisi.” There were other Italians who were camp members and, it doesn’t need said, spaghetti and meatballs were a sacred commodity in that camp! Ten (I think there were thirteen?) Italians in a deer camp has to be the next worse thing to ten clowns in a one-room schoolhouse. Indeed, Camp Lyman was a place forever etched in the mind of anyone who ever said grace at the Last-Supper-like table. Regardless, though, of how fun-loving Dad’s gang of cronies was, they took their deer hunting as seriously as the Pope might hear confession.
As a boy of the fifties, it was the very bread of life to have something paramount to boast about. I always found things about Dad to brag on since there was so little in my accomplished repertoire even remotely boastworthy. Jimmy’s dad got a nice buck. Johnny Spitznogle’s dad shot doubles on grouse. “Pinhead’s” dad took a limit of squirrels with a Stevens single in .22 rimfire and Johnny Andrew’s dad busted a tom turkey with an 8-inch beard! Etc., etc.! It got old pretty quickly and I was abusing the story about Dad’s getting over eighty parking tickets in front of his own heating and plumbing shop in town. Even though he accomplished this in well under six months! The guys had heard it long enough and I’d already worn to mere gauze the stories of his prizefighting career. I desperately needed Dad to kill, finally, a braggable buck. It would’ve been the ultimate true-life tale for in those days hunting was the thing and a man’s prowess in the big woods of the whitetail was more commendable, at least to youngsters, than a chestful of war medals.
But, year after buck-less year went by and Dad, coldheartedly I felt, even quit getting parking tickets. And Dad to his dying days was one of the best rifle shots I’ve ever known. Still, never once did he bring home a deer from the Potter county camp.
How well I can remember my nose, pressed hard against an icy, winter’s window awaiting Dad’s arrival home from Camp Lyman, the place of my boyhood dreams. I’d get unbearable butterflies in my stomach just with the anticipation of seeing a buck strapped to the fender of Dad’s old Ranch Wagon but, there never was…
I think I was fourteen when Dad invited me along on the sacred, annual ritual, the trip for deer to Camp Lyman. Five glorious days of playing “hooky” with full permission! There seemed to be something keenly celestial about the whole idea. I thought of how often I played hooky without rhyme or reason and now, in an abstract sense, it was “legal.” I was going in an attempt to supplement the family’s winter larder with venison. In a way, I felt, earning my “bacon.”
Camp Lyman: The broken screen door had no apparent function or value insofar as keeping anything out. The main door, too, was all but worthless and had to be lifted and shoved simultaneously in order to get it to open and, even though we locked it when no one was there, the lock was fraudulent, nothing more than a hardware facade. It didn’t “lock” out anything…
There were bunk beds in two bedrooms, a total of six sets, and each had a ticking that always appeared somewhat aggressive looking to me. There, too, were enough mouse droppings on each to effectively fertilize at least several gardens. A wood cookstove in the corner of the main room could easily have been owned by Methuselah himself. And he may very well have considered it an antique! There wasn’t any running water, at least inside camp, but some 100-yards away was a spring, to where buckets were carried (I was official spring boy once I became part of the gang!) when water was needed. And, of course, the hallowed outhouse! A place forever supplied with several Sears’ catalogs, most of which had only those shiny, terribly slippery, awful pages remaining; the good ones with no slickness were always gone-hidden somewhere? The sofa was unsightly, almost formidable looking with its springs poking out here and there. As though the Chinese army had used it for target practice on one of their better days.
And the one upholstered chair? It was one of those overstuffed recliners the size of Rhode Island with bulging springs that looked as though “they” had homicidal inclinations. I soon came to learn it was not as comfortable as the sagging hardwood floor and, for a time after the first visit, I had butt scars to prove it.
And yes, the all-important main table. It was massive and surely the reason for the demise of several large trees? Not level, certainly, and so far from it that once during a spaghetti and meatball dinner, Uncle Danny removed his glass eye when I wasn’t looking and set it next to his plate. Soon, the creepy little thing rolled clear over to my side of the table, ultimately stopping by the side of my plate! And there it lay. Motionless and string right up at me as though I’d done something wrong-or it wanted something and I was unable to provide it? I never, until that vivid moment, knew Uncle Danny had a glass eye! But, at the time, the whole table of hunting Italians roared with laughter as I sat there in a staredown with that part of Uncle Danny I wish (to this day!) I’d never come to know! I ate all of my pasta, but needless to say, the meatballs went unscathed; I would save them for another, less traumatic time…
I think the Camp Lyman gang put 8 deer on the lodgepole that year? None of which were mine-or Dad’s. I do recall clearly, coming back to camp for lunch two days in a row, and finding Dad fast asleep on the vindictive sofa. I also recall one of the guys asking him about whether he’d seen the buck “that surely” went past his early-morning stand. It was, according to the account, “the nice little buck that was running with a group of does, one of which was a rare piebald.” Dad denied seeing the buck, but as his son, I detected something in his tone and expressive eyes that told me something different. “Why though,” I thought, “would Dad lie about something like that?”
How well I can summon the memory of a queasy stomach when I suspected Dad of lying about not seeing the buck. I never, however, questioned him, feeling his reasons may have been private and I was always taught to fully respect a man’s privacy as well as his need for it.
Several more deer seasons came and went and I’d killed my fair share of whitetails, but Dad? Dad went without killing one for some eighteen years. Still, in my heart, I was unable to “call up” the courage to ask, “Why, Dad?”
He could shoot and everyone who knew him also knew he could make a rifle “talk.” He used to shoot out the bullet holes in our paper-plate targets and the law of averages, in those days, was surely on his side? There were a lot of deer, especially in Potter County, and Dad had one of the choice stands in the area we hunted near and around old Camp Lyman. Still, he left Pennsylvania back in ’59 and moved with our family to the San Diego area, never killing a Pennsylvania whitetail. Lost to a sort of “retirement,” was one of the best rifle shots the Lyman gang ever had…
Back in 1990, a long time after this story took place, I’d moved my family west, to eastern Oregon’s Baker City in the Powder River Valley. We’ve since returned to Pennsylvania, but while there in Baker, Pap and my stepmother came for a visit (we came to call him “Pap” in his later years.) It was about three years before I would lose Pap forever and it hurts to even type that. Of course, I didn’t know that then.
As he sat near the woodstove in our living room, warming himself, I felt I’d ask him for the long-needed answer. I didn’t want to; I just seemed to have this inner-need that was more powerful than my will power. And so, I asked.
“Pap, you were one of the best rifle shots in the county, and I know, a fine hunter in those days of Camp Lyman and Potter County. Why you used to make the nearly impossible shots on cottontails and some on ringnecks I feel ought to go down in history!” I was smiling at him then. “Why no deer Pap? In all those years when you were on top of your shooting game, not one deer? Why, Pap?” I smiled again as I awaited the answer.
He sat there for what seemed an hour, his head down as he tapped gently on my foot with his cane. Finally he looked up at me, his cheeks wet with but two tears, and looking as warmly into my eyes as he ever had. Then through the heart of a war veteran came, “Hell, Joey. I don’t know. I guess I was good on rabbits and ringnecks because not one of them ever looked me in the eyes…”
And, finally, I understood. As best I could anyway. Not all war veterans make good deer hunters-and vice-versa.
That was the last time I spoke with Pap in person. The last time I saw him alive. He finally succumbed to another “war” inside of him. And I’ve since tried to console myself with a certain knowledge. Pap got his satisfaction with and from, life. And none from death. No doubt the reason his eighteen buck tags went unfilled?
And, you know, I’d give most anything to talk with him. Just once more. I’d tell him it was okay that he never killed a whitetailed buck for me when I was a kid and that he’s still my hero. Forever and regardless, Pap…