I don’t know what my father did in the war. Except that he entered as a private, and left as a master sergeant.
He was a pattern-cutter in the garment industry in New York when he volunteered for service. By volunteering, he was able to choose the Signal Corps. It was thought that this would offer an extra measure of safety, but it did not. Someone in command had a brainwave. When the first marine hit the beach on each of the island-hopping Pacific invasions, a working telephone should be waiting. Installing that telephone line was my father’s job.
By the time I was old enough to understand my father’s war stories, he’d stopped talking about the war. My brother, who’s five years older than I am, heard all his terrifying tales of blood-curdling banzai charges in the jungle night, and of men leaping into foxholes to escape the machine-gun bullets of strafing Mitsubishi Zeros.
But there was one war story my father did continue to tell. About how, one night, he did not shoot a looter. He was guarding a supply dump on one of the Philippine islands. A young Filipino boy was running away with a case of something held over his head. My father said he shouted the warning, “Stop, or I’ll shoot!” The Filipino boy, never breaking stride, replied, “I am not the one.” My father laughed. He laughed whenever he retold that tale, and it was the only war story he ever told in his later years.
That story never seemed especially heroic to me when I was a boy. But now that I’m no longer young, it seems to me to be the very height of humanity and good sense.
My father died in 1995. There are, almost certainly, no military medals awarded for not shooting a looter, for not killing a starving, terrified boy in his own war-ravaged country, but maybe there should be.
Richmond, British Columbia