“Old Soldiers” by Gail Hosking

An old soldier I knew called me the other day to tell me a story about the Second World War that involved Sicily, the 509th Parachute Battalion, the 82nd Airborne Division, the 13th Airborne Division, Italy, a beach, my father, and a German Panzer division. Bob was my father’s company commander in the Mike Force once upon a time in 1967, and we have spoken several times over the phone. He tells me this time that my father at eighteen in The Second World War was the last to jump off his plane into Italy with the 509th, and thus, landed ten miles off target. His group scattered when they landed, once they recognized they were outnumbered by German tanks. He said that my father had to make his way back to the beachhead. Or was it to southern France? He wasn’t sure. Though I do have an old black and white picture of my father around a makeshift grill in the mountains of southern France near an old stone barn with several other young soldiers.

Bob used the word Avinano, or that’s what I thought I heard. I can’t find it online anywhere. Maybe he meant Anzio. How Bob knows this, I don’t know. He says my father spoke German then, but I don’t think so. I know he studied German during the Cold War and eventually spoke it fluently, but I don’t think he did at eighteen. He had dropped out of high school to join the army. It’s a long story. But this scene of the 509th parachute group, nicknamed Geronimo, sounds wild. I’m not sure I believe it. But I know that my father did wear the 509 Geronimo patch proudly on his fatigue jackets, and I know he was in Italy during the war. The Battle of the Bulge came later. The mountains in southern France. I have stories and photographs to remind me. But the rest is scattered like the 509th on that beach.

My father is gone now. Killed in yet another war. This time at the age of forty-two in Asia. So I can’t ask him what really happened. Bob carries a photograph of my father in his wallet to this day. Powerful stuff about loyalty and devotion—the kind rarely seen with men in civilian life. During the phone call, he mentioned a book that he insisted I read called A Woman of No Importance by Sonia Purnell. It’s about an American woman named Virginia Hall who went undercover in France and air-dropped supplies along the way. She had a wooden leg, he said. I was on board until he mentioned that. Seemed like a Hollywood detail.

Bob is getting old now and suffers with lung issues and swallowing problems. I asked if it had anything to do with the war in Viet Nam. “Asian Orange,” he said immediately. And then there were, he said, the open burnings of human waste down by the Mekong. Toxic at best. He wanted my address to send me something. I can’t remember what now.

What do I do with all this information? These stories from long ago? Truth? It doesn’t matter.  I’ve already written a memoir about my father, as well as a collection of poems and many essays. I keep thinking each one will be the last. Here I am decades older than my father ever became and all I can do now is attend as I jot down notes. All I can do is listen over the phone to a man in Kansas who admired my father and carries information that fills his life, even as he ages and suffers long after the war is over. What keeps me listening to these stories is my father’s memory, of course. In that way, I become a witness to war, though I was never a soldier. Just an army brat, a military dependent, a daughter of a soldier. I’ve heard lots of these stories of war before. First from my father as he sat around our table in Cold War Germany telling other soldiers about Second World War battles, as I settled on the nearby couch reading Nancy Drew books. 

What I’m really trying to tell is a long story about grief and war and how life changes and how people forget and how history moves on. What I want to write about are the many layers of truth, how there really isn’t one certitude. Did my father find his way back to the 509th? Could he really speak German that well in those days? In that way, I know nothing. I cannot hold on tight to most things anymore. 

The truth is—and this you can count on—those soldiers are dying, one by one. For a time, many of them called me after I wrote the book about my father. There were several who called on a regular basis. One by one, they stopped, and I figured out they had died. For example, Mike McCarthy from Upton, Massachusetts, with his bold Boston accent. “One hell of a soldier,” he would say each time we spoke. I met him at a bar once and he stood up and saluted me. “Just like the old man,” he said. “A spitting image.” Eventually, the phone calls stopped, even the one on Memorial Day. It took me a while to recognize that he had died. Am I left as witness? And witness for what?

War is awful. We all know that. But like truth, it’s more complicated. Men love enough to die for each other. Some of them stay connected afterwards one way or another for an entire lifetime through memories, gatherings, shared stories, and sometimes through connection to the children of those soldiers. I’m not sure where I’m going with this except to say that war keeps crossing my path. The truth is I fear the phone calls and stories will stop sooner rather than later. I can already feel the emptiness of that. It’s like losing my father all over again. 

What do I do with a long list of phone numbers in a notebook, or the pages of battle details? Or my list of military words I look up later? Where does it all end? What am I doing with my life? The life that includes all these stories. Maybe it’s why I keep writing. I write for these dead men. Because art endures time and governments and battles. To write is to find a way, however limited, to the truth. What we do with that is a mystery still. I can’t fix the past. I can just tell you about what I am told, even if I write from the fringe. Even when I am outside the perimeter of war, that term my father used often when labeling his war photographs—”Inside the perimeter.” I keep writing the story to bring my father back so that he isn’t forgotten or becomes a statistic or just a name on a black wall in D.C. The phone calls from old soldiers help me remember my father’s boots by the front door of our apartment, his hugs before bed, the way he leaned back in his chair while telling stories. I recall that he read me poetry and insisted I learn how to read a map. Each phone call returns my father’s life.