A Veterans Day Remembrance Of My Father's Silent War

In the 50s, it was clearly happening. There was a deafening silence coming from many, many of our veteran fathers about what had happened in the thick of World War II.



One day, when my neighbor friend and I once again began nagging his father - a very successful and gregarious man - with questions about his coming ashore at Normandy, we expected the usual dismissive silence; but instead he turned and looked at us for a moment, with a very dark look on his face, and he gave us an answer. He spoke of only one thing - that he had manned the gun on a landing craft when it hit the beach, unloading it's troops. "I fired at everything that moved." We stood motionless­, seeing a horrible question, and after a long pause - as he watched us silently stammering­, he continued, "anything.­.. everything­!", and walked over to his swimming pool and jumped in.



To suddenly come face to face with an unfathomab­le reality of humanity made this an unforgetta­ble landmark of my youth, and is a key reason why I can easily hear the author's father saying, "Nothing like this should ever happen again."
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost