Ed. — From the Sunday, June 11, print edition.
VIRGINIA BEACH — My father showed me how to use most of the gazillion tools in our garage. He taught me to be patient
and work hard. He demonstrated the importance of family, that it is essential to be there for one another.
Robert Kennedy, who died at the age of 92 in 2016, taught me one more thing without realizing he was doing so.
Well before I came along, he was a young man from Fort Montgomery, New York, and was drafted into the U.S. Army. His enlistment began on Feb. 18, 1943, when he was 18.
My father found himself in the heart of the battle in Europe just a few months later, and he spent the next two years fighting the Nazis. He came ashore in Normandy two days after D-Day, and his unit liberated the city of Antwerp, Belgium, soon thereafter. When the war ended, his unit had just crossed the border into Germany. He celebrated the end of the war on German soil.
He came back home to New York and worked as a civil servant at West Point before moving our family to Norfolk in the 1960s.
When I was old enough, he told me stories of deadly battles, close calls in which nearby friends lost their lives and the overwhelming sounds of rocket and tank barrages.
I’m sure these weren’t easy stories to share, and I realized his life as a young man was far different than mine. My concerns were about the newly released Walkman radio and the Trivial Pursuit game. His were fighting for his country and democracy. I came to understand that war truly is hell.
But the story he shared the most about his life during World War II had little to do with fighting.
My father become a Warrant Officer for his unit, and leadership discovered that my father knew how to type. He then became the unit’s main means of processing and sending communications to other units. He said he was always close to the typewriter. He was called upon at all hours to send out messages, and he later earned a commendation for his skills and efforts in doing so.
Among his other tasks, he supervised German prisoners of war who were held captive while waiting for removal from his unit to other facilities. He told me these enemy soldiers, many of whom were the same age as my father, were required to clean when brought out of confinement.
My father and other officers supervised the work. My father said he tried to avoid looking at these captives with disdain and hate. Instead, he looked at them as human beings who, like him, found themselves in a place that wasn’t of their choosing fighting in a war.
They were teenagers and young men brought together under unspeakable circumstances. My father chose, while not ever forgetting they were the enemy, to treat them with respect and a bit of compassion for the week or two they were confined with my father’s unit.
My father told us one of these captured soldiers gave my father a gift, a small piece of scrap metal in which this soldier had used a nail to carve the word “danke,” German for thank you.
Initially, father didn’t think much of it. He told us he thought it was just part of the cleanup. He realized later what it meant.
My father brought back a few souvenirs when he finally returned home – foreign coins and a German rifle with bayonet. But it was this scrap metal which became the most memorable, though, sadly, it has been lost to time and, perhaps, family moves.
War is a horrible thing, but the human spirit can shine and cast a hopeful light upon mankind.
My father showed the best of his spirit, and this encouraged a young German soldier to show the best of his.
We should all be so blessed to learn this much.
The author, a business coach and consultant, is active in community service and enjoys time with his wife, Kim, and daughter, Kara. Reach him via email at mckco85@aol.com.
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