I do not know if I can really do this well because at 64, I have still not tried to tell this story publically.
Most of my family are French Canadian descent living in upstate New York. Cohoes has the largest cluster. Many of my Aunts refused to speak English but understood it. The ties from Normandie had been kept for generations. And the history of it all has been felt.
A lot of this not good and somewhat tribalism. The family was very inbred. We have a lot of recessive genes before people really understood what that was about. We have rh negative, hemophilia, and gender issues that are never ever discussed. My maternal grandmother was one of 13 children and the only one to get old--over 50. Her husband's lungs were severely damaged by mustard gas in France.
In 1939, my father was so desturbed by what he could see happening in France that he quit HS as a senior went to Canada and enlisted.
After ten weeks of hard combat basic, he was sent to North Africa. There he fought both Nazis and the Arabs. He hated the Germans as a concept of a society gone crazy. But his hatred for Arabs is deep visceral and often outrageous. And at this age, I know now it is because he feared them. It is a fear he never got over.
Two things that are not well known: Churchill at 25 survived in 1898 the last great calavary charge of the British Empire, the Battle of Omdurman in the Sudan. There are many who believe that was the beginning of the end of the British Empire. The British lost and many encyclopedia never states that--they note the battle. It was the first time the British tactic of four square was broken.
The tactics of the Arabs won. The move Four White Feathers has been made five times about this. There is only one worth seeing is the Heath Ledger
performance directed by British educated Indian director Shekhar Kapur. They did the film in 90 days in 2002. It was a message from one people to another and Americans were never encouraged to see it. This was the least promoted Ledger film ever, staying on screen on average less than three weeks and very few critical discussions about the validity of the film. Most critics used the usual distracting tactics of talking about the efficacy of Kate Hudson's appearance and lack of chemistry.
This movie shows the fearsomeness of Arab tactics. What blew me away about the film was the digging hidey holes in the sand and the use of them in 1898 was exactly what my father encountered in North Africa with tanks. He was never taught about Omdurman because we don't put our shreddings down on paper. We liked to believe what little tactics they had came from Lawrence of Arabia--don't you believe it. The Arabs won the Crusades multiple times. They are the Indians of the desert and they know when to fade into the mirage. Unlike Native Americans they had more than enough contact to Westerners not to be exterminated by plague.
When I saw the major UN hotel go down because donkey carts with explosives got thru; I knew we would never ever impose anything top down in the Middle East. I have seen the deep after effects. The Middle East has never surrendered they just keep changing their hidey holes. Having personally studied the history of military tactics, I am always more appalled by what is not taught.
When the US enters WWII, the first thing they do is reclaim all the Americans fighting under different flags in the Middle East. They are brought to West Point and turned into 90 day wonder lieutenants because we have to have battle hardened leaders immediately. They are then sent back to North Africa under Patton. This is really where the war is won. We keep the oil supply from the Axis powers. From now on, it is a war of attrition; terrible but inevitable.
My father had a small brownie camera that took 2 by 2 black and white pictures. Growing up, I would go through about ten cigar boxes of them. When my father got out in 45; he was 26 and he looked 56. He was a major by field command survival--everybody above him had been killed.
The head on fighting with the Germans my father never expressed much grief over. It was the doing the job such as it was. But the Arabs made him foaming at the mouth crazy. That was because he never saw them. They would slip through the lines at night and cut one throat ear to ear in each tent. They would steal food one night--down to almost everything. The guard would be increased on that kind of stuff and they would get the gas cans. Men learned to sleep on their feet marching because any form of sleeping at night in the desert camped out was too dangerous. Ironically, it was those who were awake they killed first and those sleeping awoke to see mutilation.
My father and men like him, like Churchill surviving the most brutal retreat in British military history at 25, created the CIA concepts and foreign policy. Because they never talked about their reasoning in depth and with many, the emotional craziness of it is not exposed. Irrational rage is self perpetuating. My father, like Patton, are the hot fighters and when your back is against the wall, this is what you want.
But if you want a major planned military success invasion, you want Ike who comes from cool tactics and attention to detail. Normandy was chosed for its small pebble stone beaches where you got a lot more traction than sand. A first major deciding point.
My father was taught by the army to be an adrenalin junky. He could have gotten court martialed many times but they needed guys like him so he would have to peel potatoes for a week. I know that my father did things like Jack Bauer out in the field but his field was everything and his men the only thing that mattered to him. In the field only results count.
He went all the way up Sicily to Naples some of the longest hardest fighting ever. Yet, when they got to Naples there were tens of thousands of starving Italians that suddenly we had to feed and care for a civilian population and stabilize them before we could commence killing more of the enemies. Did Cheney and his cohorts miss that lesson? Oh wait, they never studied real military problems--they just made them up as they went along. How is that working out?
In the midst of this Vesuvius erupts. Not much reporting on this complication, but I saw the pictures. My father and some of his friends commandeered a plane and flew up and down close to the lava flows to get those pictures. They got so much debris in the plane's engines by the time they landed the plane had to be crushed. This was a no no but considered good bs so they only got a slap on the wrist.
When my father gets back to the US, he like many GIs, takes his bonus, his back pay, and his winning gambling money and starts his own business. When the Korean War breaks out my father is just short of 29 the cut off for the new draft. And he is selectively called back because he had the reputation for being one mean son of a bitch that other men would fight for. But for some reason he is denied his battle field commission and he is made a Master Sargeant and drill instructor first. He hates this and resents the loss of status etc. so they eventually sent him to Korea. He is there about 45 days when he and most of his company is captured.
He spends about 18 months a POW. I have never known the real details. I do know that both his legs were broken. The only thing he would ever talk about were the goddamn kids who wouldn't fight. In the context of his periodic drunken rages, in the POW camps many of the really young kids just died. They stopped eating and stopped psychologically fighting. This was unforgivable to my father. That he could neither inspire them nor save them drove him literally crazy.
About 1952, he was sent to Fort Sam Houston Texas in San Antonio for rehabilitation. My mother, two aunts, and two children traveled down Apalachia in a 1932 Ford with no floor boards so he could have family support for trying to stop being crazy. It took us six weeks--they were just building roads then--a possible other diary.
My father was never the same. The way the army functioned then was not to throw these men out but to keep them and make them as functional as possible. One it was a duty then and two, you never knew then when you might need them again. We spent six years in San Antonio and then averaged a move every five months.
For the record, imagine a man like my father being told he could not vote in Texas because he did not own property. He got in many a bar brawl over that.
My father remained obscessed with physical fitness until he had a stroke at 48. He would do one finger pushups. At 35, he would yell at all these young punks as DI, I am twice as old as you and I can cream all your asses.
He was obsessive compulisive about a place for everything and everything in its place. He was into physcial punishment big time for any and all infractions of anything. Obediance was to be instant and without question. Eventually beatings went from a responsive failure to use as preventative or pre emptive war on everything.
In September, 1961, my father was beating my brother so bad for skipping school that I was thinking I needed to get the gun in the garage and kill him. The phone rang and three hours later my father was on his way to Berlin. I am told he and men like him got a lot of people out of Berlin before the wall of initial rassor wire totally encircled the city.
As for me, I never called him father again.
My father is my country. He came to its needs. He gave it everything--including his possible soul. He tortured both his wives and children, thinking it would make them strong. They were essentially destroyed and were never able to think their way out of the pain. With the best of intentions, this is my father's legacy.
I have forgiven my father much because I have seen in pictures the devoluton of an individual captured in a system. My father never had the education or the where with all to see the forest for the trees.
But god gave me both talent and intelligence to be used to stop the craziness. It took me a long time to do it for myself. I am now trying to master the courage to share a liftime of knowledge.
I am a victim of torture that has echoed back and forth through generations across the face of the planet. I have seen the residuals for decades for the grandchildren and for the great grandchildren still unborn
the psychic lashes stand ready.
I thought we as a people and nation settled all this. Torture is not the answer; it is the perpetration. To do it within a legal framework is the most obscene thing my country has ever done. This is my case for legal disbarment as the most necessary action for this country to redeem itself.