My Father's War

 

My dad posing in New Guinea, his hand strategically placed against the company sign, which was painted by fellow Kingsport draftee Worley Lane. 

My father would never talk about the war.

When I was a kid, this was no big deal. Everybody’s dad had been in the war and none of their dads would talk about the war either.

I knew my father had served in the Pacific, I knew he was a supply sergeant and I knew we had a photo album of his war-time photos, mostly scenes of laughing G.I.’s clowning around in hula skirts, bombed out buildings in Manila, a couple of topless New Guinea women: the closest thing I got to Playboy for many years.

I would ask questions, he would evade them.

“I served under McArthur, he would joke. “Way under.”

But what did you do, I would ask. “Supply sergeant,” he would say. “The man behind the man behind the gun.”

That’s about all I got. He bragged how he got around Army censorship rules. “We weren’t allowed to tell where we were. So I would write to your mother, ‘Do you remember the family that lived across from the Green Shed church? How are they doing?’ That was the Hagens. She would look on her map and see Mt. Hagen and know that I was in New Guinea.”

He once told me about waking up and finding a dud bomb outside his tent.

And he frequently recalled that the saddest day of his life was passing under the Golden Gate Bridge, on board a ship headed for the Pacific Theater. “They were playing ‘Oh What A Beautiful Morning’  on the radio but it wasn’t a beautiful morning for me.”

But that was it. I didn’t know what he did. In the absence of any details, I created my own image of his wartime experience, a picture cobbled together from fifties war movies, Sgt. Bilko TV episodes and Beetle Bailey comic strips. I figured his was a desk job, hand out uniforms, order rice and beans for the mess hall. More like a country club than a war zone.

When I got in my twenties, I wanted to know more. “You don’t want to hear about that,” he would say, effectively ending the conversation.

When I bought my first VCR, I offered to rent “The World at War” and watch it with him. “I don’t want to see it; I lived it,” he said. And that was that.

On his deathbed in 1986 I asked once more; could we talk about the war? He agreed but died before we ever got around to that talk.

After he died, I made a discovery while digging around in a drawer in my father’s desk. It was a drawer I’d never searched before. On the surface it appeared to be a collection of order forms from his hardware store. But in the back, all rolled up, was the photo of his Army unit. A mimeographed sheet curled inside the photo gave the details: this was the 850th Ordnance Depot Company, 155 men, photographed in front of their barracks on 16 December 1943, shortly before they shipped out. The company could as easily have been called the 850th Tennessee: 107 of the 155 were from Tennessee, 20 from Kingsport.

There was my father, third row, sixth from the right, a hint of a smile on his face. I knew that smile. That was not his happy smile.

Then watching the Iraqi war on TV shed new light on what my father did.

War is not a country club, no matter what your job. When the Iraqi war started, the first P.O.W.’s weren’t Green Berets; they were a group from the 507th Ordnance Maintenance Company. These weren’t frontline soldiers, with assault rifles and hand grenades. These were auto mechanics, cooks, support services, like my father.

It suddenly became clear: my mother has always said she didn’t sleep for three years, the three years my father was overseas. I understand now.

War isn’t tidy. The enemy’s rules of engagement don’t say spare the cooks and quartermasters. Maybe my father didn’t carry an M-16, but he was a target, too. The Japanese didn’t care if he was in charge of routing foodstuffs or routing munitions - I think he did both. He was the enemy and he was as valued a target as any frontline sharpshooter. He was in enemy territory, where a crafty company of Japanese fighters might circle around to the rear, cut-off the soldiers from the supplies. And capture the quartermaster.

Bombers, snipers, artillery, they didn’t differentiate. There weren’t classes of enemy targets. There were only targets and my father, along with 1,458,911 soldiers in the Pacific theater, was one. He spent three years in harm’s way and I never knew that.

I’ve tried to research his unit but I can’t find a company history. I can’t even find a record of what units they were attached to.

His best buddies from the service, Stump and Whittamore, died before he did.

I can’t get any stories from them. That part of my history is lost.

I hope the surviving veterans of my father’s war will write down their stories, tape their memories, tell their sons what they did in the war.

I don’t know what hell my father saw, what hell he experienced.

But I think I now know why.

I don’t know what he did in the war because he didn’t want me to know.

 

 

The 850th Ordnance Depot Company on Dec. 16, 1943, right before shipping out.

 

I.D.'s of soldiers from Kingsport.

Cyrus Vineyard (2nd row, 4th from left)

Ralph S. Cooper (2nd row, 6th from left)

Clifford Broome (2nd row, 7th from left)

William I. Fleenor (Fleanor on I.D. sheet, Fleenor in Times News when he was drafted) (2nd row, 8th from left)

Ernest Whittamore (2nd row, 9th from left)

Jack B. Cox (2nd row, 11th from left)

Samuel T. Elliot (2nd row, 28th from left)

Millard C. Peters (2nd row, 31st from left)

Frank J. Martin (3rd row, third from left)

Alton L. Hamilton (3rd row, 10th from left)

Edgar J. Sensabaugh (3rd row, 14th from left)

John C. Riley (3rd row, 23rd from left)

Romulus Wilmeth (3rd row, 30th from left)

Lyle Staten (3rd row, 6th from right)

Phonso L. Durham (Top row, 32nd from left)

Park Corum (Top row, 47th from left)

 

Worley R. Lane

Ralph Stump

Friel V. Jennings

John W. Quillen

Unidentified from Kingsport because mice chewed the ID sheet.

I think top row, 14th from left is Worley Lane.

And I think top row 12^th from left is Ralph Stump.