I want to describe where we are trying to go with The Rake, and to beg your patience while we inevitably stumble on our way. Basically, we want to be storytellers. All the other stuff we’ll do will be to make room for more stories.
I always envied my father’s ability to make up stories while he was driving the family from Iowa to Colorado on vacation. Our two favorites were “Art Bartel: The One-Man Division” about his exploits in World War II, and “El Diablo” about when he was a cowboy by day and righter-of-wrongs and wooer-of-senoritas at night. We didn’t know it then, but that story about how he held off an entire Panzer division with “nothing but a .45” wasn’t complete bullshit.
He was a member of the 5th Ranger Battalion. He was at Bastogne. He was at the Huertgen Forest. He won a Silver Star, a Bronze Star with a cluster, several unit citations, and three Purple Hearts. After he was shot the third time, he spent a year in a hospital. But he wouldn’t talk about that, so he spun out comic book stories. The truth, my brothers and I realized later, was that he couldn’t tell us what he really had done, because that would mean he’d have to tell us about how a ricochet from his gun hit his friend in the throat, or how his best friend from the high school class of 1941 had drowned when his ship was torpedoed in the English Channel, or how he had killed 23 Germans with their own machine gun because he was too scared to get up and run after seeing two other guys shot in the back.
So, we got the story of blowing up a tank with one bullet from the .45, instead of the one about how he lay wounded in a drainage ditch and shot morphine into his leg until the survivors of his squad could knock out the machine gun at the end of the street. Instead of talking about the life expectancy of replacements, he’d only tell us of the advice he lived by: “Try to look unimportant, the Germans may be low on ammo,” and “Never share a foxhole with someone braver than you.”
Based on that scant testimony, I didn’t understand why he tried so hard to keep me out of Vietnam, or why he never joined the VFW, or why he wouldn’t go back to France. All he would say is that anyone who glorified war had never seen one, or he’d make some crack about the guys in the “mess kit repair battalion.”
My father has still left all the details unspoken. I’ve got them from my mother, my aunts, some old letters, and a Silver Star citation I found in a box. This year, he wrote his memoirs, but mostly left out the war. We pry at family dinners, but when he starts to remember, he gets sad and makes up a story about something else-like when he was a cowboy. There’s no bullshit there. He can really ride a horse.
Until I can get him to tell the real El Diablo story, we hope to fill The Rake with stories as good. In the meantime, please write us and tell us how we’re doing. Next month, this space is yours.
Leave a Reply