By Jim Benning
In December of 1944, the German army attacked Allied troops in Bastogne, Belgium, igniting the Battle of the Bulge. My father was a paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne Division. I‘d always assumed he had killed people. He’d never talked about it, and I’d never asked him. I’d never had the nerve.
I longed to bridge the divide. I thought my father’s years at war might hold a key to understanding him—that somewhere in the bloom of youth and the trauma of combat, the kernel of the man I knew was formed. So I asked him to travel with me to Western Europe.
We drove through the Belgian countryside, past fields dotted with wildflowers and fat cows. I was thirty. He was seventy-six, a gentle man with short, gray hair and big glasses.
In a museum we watched a short documentary about the battle. Black-and-white footage showed American soldiers marching through snow. Explosions flashed on the screen, along with photos of corpses. My father was sitting beside me, and I heard his breathing change. He wiped his eyes.
We still don’t have a good way to measure the toll war takes on survivors, and the way war’s effects could be passed along in one form or another from fathers to sons, and mothers to daughters—a kind of lingering post-traumatic stress that trickles down, however subtly, through generations. I thought about the grief my father seemed to carry at times, and wondered if it was the same grief I sometimes felt, seemingly inexplicably.
Later, we drove through Stavelot, where my dad recalled a bridge in the area being blown, and having to march while carrying 30-caliber machine gun canisters. He remembered mortar rounds raining down. He and others attacked a farmhouse occupied by German soldiers.
I kept my eyes on the road and took a deep breath.
“Dad, in all of the time you’ve talked about the war, you’ve never talked about having to shoot people.”
I wanted to push him into uncomfortable territory. I wanted him to open up, to talk to me, to tell me things. I wanted to connect. A moment passed. He was quiet.
“I shot people,” he said, finally.
I glanced at him. He was looking out the window.
“You become callous to it in combat,” he said. “You fire at a guy, see him drop, then fire at someone else. You don’t dwell on it.”
“You’re probably just too concerned with staying alive,” I said.
“Definitely. In spite of what some guys say, I was scared to death. I never got over that. I don’t think you can come away from that unscarred.”
“How could anyone?”
For a few precious moments, the gulf between us shrank.
