Get your own Free Home PageThe headstone at my father's grave reads simply: "Lee S. Reese, Jr., Corporal, US Army". Although I realize the Veteran's Administration paid for the headstone as a final benefit to one of its soldiers, I find it funny that it mentions nothing about the last 50 years of his life; his nine children, his twenty-three years as a Scout leader, his forty years with the Texas Department of Transportation. In fact, his headstone describes a person I never really knew.
All the time I was growing up, I knew that my father had been a machine-gunner in World War II and had been wounded in action. We regarded with awe the Purple Heart that he kept behind glass in the living room, and felt very secure with him around the house, knowing that the neighborhood hooligans would think twice before crossing an experienced soldier, who surely, we thought, still had a machine gun stashed away somewhere (in fact, we lived in a very rough neighborhood; a sixteen-year-old boy who lived across the street from us was murdered the year before we moved away).
Daddy never talked about his war experiences, however. When the miniseries "Holocaust" aired for the first time, he refused to watch it, saying it brought back too many painful memories. For years I longed to know more about his wartime experiences, but did not know how to breach the subject. When he died suddenly in 1996, I thought his story died with him-- until I came across this first-hand account of his war experiences in his computer.
I consider "War Memories" to be a wonderful gift. The humor and grace with which he handled his painful memories are remarkable, and his accounts gave me an insight into the man I had never had before. Instead of the grim, stalwart warrior I imagined as a child, Daddy painted himself as he really was: A gangly, awkward, naive, and often frightened nineteen-year-old boy thrust unwillingly onto the stage of History. To me, this made my memories of him all the more appealing.
One more note--in the mid-40's there was no such thing as "political correctness", and my father never really got the hang of it in the '90's, either. There are a few passages in this account that would not pass today's "litmus test" for political correctness, such as use of the word "Negro" or references to wartime songs about "dirty old Japs". I think it is appropriate, however, to leave these passages as they are, since they accurately reflect the attitude of the times. It was not my father's place, nor is it now mine, to re-write history for the sake of cultural sensitivity.
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