THIS IS ANOTHER STORY I'VE TOLD BEFORE but not nearly enough. It's about my father, Harry Benjamin DeLeon, and about the time he went to war. Which was 1942 when he was drafted at the age of 33 years old, married with child, and one on the way. And away he went. I'm sure he had feelings about all that, but he never spoke them. Not to me. Probably not to anyone. When he came back after three years, he was a different person, I have been told. I wasn't born yet. The father I grew up with never spoke of World War II, not the stuff a son wanted to hear anyway. Did you kill anybody? Were you scared? What was the scaredest you ever were?
My dad never told. All through Vietnam, he never told, even after I said horrible things about the United States military in anger. My father served without judging, except in the darkness he could not share. Every story my father told about World War II ended with a punchline that wasn't funny. It was supposed to be funny, but it was just bewildering. The story about an R & R in India was supposed to be funny because it ended with monkeys throwing rocks at the tin roof of the quansot hut they slept in "just to keep us awake." But the monkeys were a metaphor my father could not descibe. On his way to rest and relaxation a truckload of American boys went off a cliff, and men like my father had to rappel down the mountainside to recover their bodies. And the monkeys threw rocks just to keep them awake.
Until years after the day he died, I never knew that my father took part in the invasion of Okinawa in August 1945. He was 36 years old at the time. When the atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima and then Nagasaki, my father was on a ship off the coast of Japan awaiting the order to invade. And all the time in the living years if we ever argued about the morality of using the atomic bomb, my father never called me dumb or lucky. Dad was never one of those "You'd all be speaking Japanese if it weren't for me" guys. But he was on a ship off the coast of Japan when we dropped the big one. Which makes me awed and grateful in a way only you can imagine. I can imagine not saying these words, or any words, or ever existing for that matter. But imagine if you were in the middle of that story from a son who never lived because his father died before he was born.
What are you staring at?
Leave a comment