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February 6, 2015

My father parachuted into Germany and was captured that very same week.

He and his Screaming Eagles company buddies, Heshie and Whitey, were holed up in a farmhouse, armed with sub- machine guns, when a Tiger Tank rolled up to the square structure,  put its muzzle into a window and fired.

He recalled his gnawing hunger, and often told me that at the prisoner of war camps

at night when he slept, mice would creep into his buttoned shirt vest pocket to steal the few crumbs of bread he had hidden there before he could awaken and slap his pocket.

 

He weighed eighty-eight pounds when he was liberated.

Once, on a work detail outside and beyond the barbed wire fence, he saw a skeletal group of Jews, literally walking skeletons and in abject pity, he threw a piece of his bread over a fence to them, which they all frantically scrambled for.

The supervising German sergeant of those doomed Jews saw him do this and walked over to him and put a Luger into my father’s mouth and pulled the trigger.

The gun misfired.

Twice.

His mind and lifelong emotional mental state were never the same after that incident, and for the rest of his life, he remained an unhappy and mostly unpleasant man.

 

He, many years later, when I was a child, would retrieve moldy bread and brown wilted lettuce from the trash, raging angrily about,” perfectly good , wasted food”, and we all learned that, for any peace of mind, food garbage was best thrown into the incinerator, long before he came home, from work.

Once, while we were fishing together, catching  striped bass under the shade of the Marine Parkway Bridge, he told me what he had seen of the Waffen S.S. Units, who specialized in the wholesale murders of Jews.

The pitched sickness of the waves, the sharp sour stink of fish, the stench of gasoline from the engine, the pungent, ‘piss-can’ and his recollections of the horrors that he had seen, during the war, all combined to make me deathly ill each time that we fished together..

The prisoner of war camp’s confinement had chafed his soul and

long after the war, he again could escape the inglorious chafing of marital and work confinements, by seeking the open ocean, to fish for striped bass.

He loved fishing more than anything or anyone person in his life, and he ached to be free and alone, on a landscape of waves,

with only gulls, for company.

He spent all of his spare time, nights and weekends, alone on the open Atlantic ocean, a peaceful landscape, land escape, far from all dangerous and murderous distant coastlines.

When he thought that I was old enough to be of use to him, he brought me into his escapist world of  fishing solitude , and far out on the waters of the Atlantic, far from any constricting shore, he would ventilate and tell me his memories, all horrific war stories.

When I was much too young,  to be alone with his damaged soul, eight and nine and ten years of age, my father would wake me every Friday night at 2:00 A.M. 

 

and by 3:15 A.M. we were out in the far waters of Long Island Sound ,in his boat, fishing for striped bass and bluefish, until the sun came up and those fish became quiescent and stopped feeding and taking lures.

We watched the gulls; wherever they were raucous and feeding, we always caught many large fish, as schools were underneath, forcing the bait to the surface, which, in turn attracted the sea birds.

It was a foolproof technique.

After the sun came up, numbed and exhausted from the night’s toll, we sat anchored and jigged the bottom for fluke and flounders, to return to the dock at 12 noon.

Bereft of the engine’s roar and the slap of the waves, against the speeding hull, while we sat, he would speak to me of horrors that he seemed forced to tell me.

Every weekend of my youth was spent this way, catching large fish;  I was agog and seasick for days afterwards, all the while envisioning deep trenches in the furrows of the waves, densely filled with the screaming doomed families of  Jews, as Ukrainian driven bulldozers, pushed tons of soil, to bury all of them, alive.

Once, after listening to such tales, I noticed that each time  I netted and landed a fish, into the boat, that the water would swirl and splash, a few seconds afterwards, and I asked my father the cause of this bizarre and repeated occurrence.

He blithely told me, expertly casting a lure far from the boat, that the fish’s mate would break the water, seeking his lost and snared mate, following soon after, in a futile search.

In that  frozen moment, with the boat at my feet filled with flopping fish, jaws gaping in the air’s suffocation, the horrors in his stories resurfaced:

dead children in the streets, who resembled dolls, their jaws open,

skeletal Jews with pleading eyes,

children murdered before their parents’ eyes,

of a Waffen S.S. who used his machine pistol to separate a closely knit family,

and of their wails of separation, which years later, would ring in my father’s head.

I suddenly realized, in horror, that each swirl and splash of water, after I had pulled one fish into the boat, was a grieving and bereft mate, and thus surely a broken heart, that fish were individuals, with feelings, and not mere products!

The horror of our caught fish, dead and dying at my feet, of loved ones’ final, forceful separation, in a single frozen moment, broke my young heart and I found that I could no longer bear to catch, or to ever eat fish,  again.

Recalling these memories is not a freeing and therapeutic catharsis; it is instead,  a sad nostalgia, a morbid whimsy .

I have carefully locked the vault door of my mind against the worst recollections: the horrors of living with him, for he had fully absorbed the repeated brutality of his past experiences.

Throughout life, he radiated the same heavy-handed violence to those around him, using his fists, where a word, instead, might have sufficed.

Those other recollections, if unlocked behind my mind’s protective vault doors, would make these recalled experiences fully pale, by comparison.

When I can ever hazard to open those vault doors,  locked and made of three feet of  tempered steel, therapeutic and freeing, might then conceivably ensue.

Debriefing combat troops, is still nonexistent; one arrives fresh from combat at San Diego Airport or Kennedy International Airport.

The same psychic injuries that our most recent troops have sustained in Iraq and Afghanistan, unseen and unmeasured injuries, are like my father’s deep and painful scars on their souls; many, after drug and alcohol addiction fails to assuage their spiritual grief, take their own lives, in suicides, suffering from combat angst, beyond any words.

I can recall General Patton coming under criticism for slapping the face of and calling a coward, one young soldier in a field hospital, who was trembling with severe shell shock.

Even our military fails to understand what happens to America’s young men who have been taught all of their lives,”Thou shalt not kill”, after they are trained to be killing machines to then aptly fill that job description, in several  tours of duty.

How is one to understand?

Rather than wrongly judging that my father wallowed in these memories, he instead was surely drowning, within a deeper struggle, far removed from self pity.

Though he never once told me, within the recollections of the circle of my life with him, that he loved me, I  should have told him ,

 that I loved him .

Author’s note:

Just before he died, at eighty-four, after a lifetime of no contact with him, I visited him at the Saint Albans Veterans Hospital Facility.

How I learned that he was there, is a paranormal story beyond belief, but one reserved for another time.

Even after a stroke and a heart attack, confined to a wheelchair, his bristling aggression and smoldering anger had still radiated.

He had angrily cursed God, to me, when I did mention God, to him, repeatedly cursing God, saying that there was NO God, and as proof, again offered me what he had seen of the long ago mass murders of Jewish children, by Nazi Waffen S.S. troops.

He had repeated that he was taught, by those experiences,  to be an atheist, one who didn’t believe a single, solitary word about God, and then he had openly cursed God, again.

I  chided him, that although God WAS, surely, all loving, that God might get annoyed, to be cursed, so.

Slowly, I  realized an element of spiritual rescue, a spiritual coup de’ grace, I had been forced to bring along with me, to his bedside to deliver to him.

I told him that he was surely wrong; that the proof of God only seemed invisible and inaccessible because it was too merged within our consciousness and within everything all around us, to be so easily detected.

I told him that I , over years of learning, and another lifetime, far away from him, had become psychic enough to glean more: that we are NOT people, having spiritual/ paranormal experiences, but are, instead, undying spirits, within a  DNA contrived housing, having HUMAN experiences.

 That we ‘step out of’ our bodies at death, as we do our cars and our clothing, in physical life and that we contain a spark of the divine God, within us, who imbued us with consciousness.

We are no more our bodies, I had said, than we are our clothing or our vehicles.

I had assured him that I had learned that our consciousness in truth reincarnated often, to learn spiritual lessons; that God gives us many lifetimes to refine and hone our souls, to learn lessons that we set out for ourselves.

 With some pride, I had reminded him that his lifetime’s recollections of horrid war experiences, revealed a braver and nobler inner spirit, than most, to have chosen such harsh and horrid lessons.

He quietly listened,

with barely a vague inkling of acceptance.

A week later, preparing to visit him, again,  I got a phone call from the hospital, that he had passed in the night, from a second and final heart attack.

Many months later, while I was playing  bass guitar, (playing music, much like sleep, driving distances, or hypnotic television watching, seems to suppress my left brain’s blocking aspect, and paranormal experiences occur) in my living room, his face suddenly loomed into my mind’s eye and I all at once suddenly felt his closeness.

Instead of an accompanying sad heaviness,

his energy radiated  a youthful joyous presence.

Stunned, I psychically acknowledged him, with love, but also with great worry; I cautiously admonished him for hazarding to linger on this plane, and asked him to quickly jump into the Light.

His accompanying  joy, a mixture of freedom from worry, from bedworn immobility, from sadness, with an element of thanks, thrilled me.

Perhaps, I reasoned, I had delivered that essential message, to him, in much needed time.

 As a writer, it is difficult to capture the strained, forced familiarity of families’ troubled interactions, governed by fruits of traumas, into words.

With my growing  penchant for paranormal bleed-throughs, I surmise that

 my father was with and around me, during this writing.