The Buried War

By Bill Beltz

The Buried War is a bugle cry; a Reveille of rage and a eulogy for the lost souls of war. It is the story of my father, his PTSD as a WW II veteran, my own journey as a Franciscan monk and heartfelt struggle with depression throughout my life. It is the story of a family from Alliance, Ohio weathering the storm of incredible poverty and hopelessness while living with the insanity of a father impaired and afflicted by the war. It is the story of my search for purpose and meaning by following the way of St. Francis of Assisi even after leaving behind the robe, the cord and the sandals.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press
• Release date: Mar 7, 2016
• ISBN: 9781504345514

Bill Beltz

Bill Beltz was born in Alliance, Ohio in 1948. He holds an Ed. M. in Psychology and Learning Disabilities. After spending several years as a Franciscan monk and teacher he is now an entrepreneur with a business that he has owned and managed for over thirty-five years. He is a Board Member of the Thomas Wolfe Society, a worldwide organization that encourages readership and creative writing and is also a contributor to the Thomas Wolfe Review. His wife Karen is a retired educator. One of his favorite hobbies is section hiking the Appalachian Trail. This is his debut memoir. Follow Bill at Facebook.com/BURIEDWAR/

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PART I

ALLIANCE THE RAILROAD TOWN

ONE

T HERE WAS THAT LOUDNESS, that anger, that hatred and that whatever he could imbibe into his blood that made all things twisted, irrational, incomprehensible on the inside, the outside, around, above and below, horrid, fearful and frightful. He was violent, abusive and unstable. That was my father -Arthur Elmer Beltz.

He worked at the post office delivering mail door to door. He would stop at the bar. Once home he’d take a puff from his cigarette and then take a drink. "I fought for three goddam years- you better goddam believe it, fought for three that was three goddam years," he’d yell.

Then he’d start on Mom’s Dad, my grandfather, "Charlie Weyer never fought for a goddam three years, never. He never fought for a good — goddam — day. The son of a bitch says I’m not worth a goddam? Why, he’s a prick and a goddam sonofabitch."

He’d then yell at Mom, He wouldn’t have a pot to pee in if it weren’t for me and for what I did for this country. Nobody knows what I went through. He’d stick his hand in his pocket, grab his loot and throw it across the room. You need money? Here’s your goddam money!

He walked over to the living room and looked at all eight of us. He screamed, We had to dig holes and hope that we wouldn’t get hit. The bullets, the bombs, my buddies being shot, and all I could do was be still, not move, hoping that the next round was not meant for me. My buddies would then get blown away, torn, dismembered. I stayed in my hole, my foxhole, my only place for hours, sometimes for days. When the rains stopped and the noise from gunfire went away, we pulled back. I could barely walk. I had pain from my back. There were the mosquitoes and the Jungle Rot from the filthy bug infested dirt and mud. The Jungle Rot and wet filth everywhere. Guns being fired again and again. Jungle Rot kept me awake. I didn’t know where it came from. I was there in the dark, looking for a place to sleep on the soggy ground, hoping that the rain would stop. But it did not stop. Even if I could find a place, I could not stop the pain from the Jungle Rot and the back pain. It ate my skin and there was no way of getting rid of it. He would look at us while smoking his cigarette, You know what Jungle Rot is? You don’t want to know. You better goddam don’t want to know. You better goddam believe it, drinking his beer, "You don’t want to know what it is. Your Grandpa doesn’t know what it is. Your mother doesn’t know what it is. No one here knows what the fuck it is. You don’t want to know what it is. And I go out there, carrying the mail everyday so we can have food and live in this house. My back is so bad that I can hardly move. You better believe it. You better goddam believe it."

His voice would broadcast into the neighborhood, through its black cinder alleyways that surrounded the house, to all those with perked ears anxiously awaiting another outburst of madness from the Beltz residence.

I was seven and it was 1955. The pounding rains would come; his loud voice would now compete against the parallel forces of nature. Thunderclaps after the lightning became as predictable as the yelling and the screaming.

Alliance had some of the most remarkable and horrifying thunderstorms. Now I can only try to remember what it was like as they lit the skies and protruded with their billowing monster clouds. I should feel safe, I thought, with this mom and dad around me. Dads and moms were supposed to make you feel safe like they did on shows like Father Knows Best or Leave it to Beaver. I knew that my parents had experienced these storms in their own good time so that nothing bad would ever happen to me when they were around. But I was wrong. There would be a huge but momentous pause like steam building in a pressure cooker. He’d take another drink and another puff from his cigarette.

I served my country and what in the hell do I get for it? A goddam nothing- you better goddam believe it, a goddam nothing!

My supposed bastion of comfort was compromising his ability to make me feel safe not only in this horrendous thunderstorm but also in this family and in this house by the railroad tracks. This storm would have such a deafening thunderclap that it would cause dogs, cats and kids to tremble and hide. We could only be saved by offering up a lit Catholic candle that Mom would pull out of a drawer.

Dad fought for thirty-six months in combat Battery C 135th Field Artillery in Guadalcanal and the Solomon’s. It was the first land battle in World War II and one of the longest, bloodiest and most gruesome ever fought.

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Art Beltz on the left with unknown soldier on the right before going to war

He was 5’9" with blondish hair and blue eyes. He would now carry a brown leather mailbag door-to-door, trying to scrape up enough money to support us. He would claim the alcohol was his only relief for the back pain and trauma from the War. Besides randomly beating us with his belt, he once came close to burning down the house with a cigarette he left burning on a chair in the basement while in one of his drunken states. We then had a fire alarm installed in the house in case we had another fire. Dad would come home late after stopping at a bar and just for the hell of it would push the damn fire alarm, waking us and also waking the entire neighborhood. We would never know when he would set off the alarm.

But in the background there was always the train, blowing its whistle and firing its pistons, as if to compete with the flashing and the thunder and all the other ramblings and unstoppable blathering of a raging madman and the beatings and abusiveness that he constantly waged on Mom and all of us kids.

While visiting my maternal Grandparent’s house, which was several blocks from our home on High Street, Mom would say to Grandpa Weyer, Now you know, Pop, it hasn’t been a bed of roses for Art. She was referring to Dad. He’s had a tough time trying to adjust to civilian life after coming home. He’s got everyone down on him. He’s working hard at the post office. Even his own parents are giving him a hard time. Nobody seems to want to try to understand him and what he’s going through.

Grandpa would say, Well, excuse me! Presenting to you his Royalty, the Crown Prince of the Goddam Shithouse. Sure he fought in the war and damn if he wants everybody to goddam know it. When’s he going to get off his goddam ass and make something of himself? The lazy good for nothing son of a bitch! All rise and bow down to his Royalty. Presenting to you the crown prince of the shithouse! If he doesn’t think he’s a horse’s ass he must know that everybody else does? The sounds of the trains: always rattling the buildings and inundating the solitude with their cruel tones. They were the sounds locked in the small brain of a child and resurrected in the period of a lifetime. There were no Catholic candles to snuff the darkness and still this raging storm. There could be no safe haven here in this place where I was born.

I also became infected by my own personal monster, my own horror while playing a game of hide and seek at our house on High Street. Somebody said, go, and I scrambled to hide at the slow count of 30. I climbed up the stairs and walked into the closet of my parent’s bedroom and gingerly closed the door. I waited and waited and waited. After at least ten minutes I heard a low deep sounding voice, I’m going to eat you up!

I opened that closet door and ran down those stairs as fast as I could to my mother who was in the kitchen.

Mommy, someone told me they were going to eat me up. I was in the closet in your bedroom!

She said, Why Billy, what were you doing in my closet?

Playing hide and seek, I said. I waited and waited but nobody came. Then I heard this man. This man told me he was going to eat me up. I said, "Mommy, I’m scared. I don’t want somebody to eat me up. Will you go upstairs with me and get the monster out of there. I’m really afraid.

You don’t need to be afraid, there are no monsters there. You were just imagining something. I’ll make sure there are no monsters in my closet.

As far as I was concerned that monster would always be there. It would not only be in that closet, it would be in any closet and any other place that had a closed door in front of it. That would include basements, attics and bathrooms. I dreaded ever walking past doors to those horrific places. I could not go into a bathroom without one of my brothers going with me. My fear was compounded by the thought that there would be horrible things waiting for me like unspeakable and unknowable bad things that would eventually eat me up. My fear was that it would reach out, drag me in and gobble me up in the worse type of horror or punishment that was beyond my imagination.

I still have remnants of the fear and anxiety from my father and the closet monster. These still haunt me even before I can open my eyes in the morning.

But all of this happened so long ago and should have been forgotten. Yes, this was the place, the time and yes, these were the people brought to my attention again and again, throughout my lifetime, wherever I lived, by the sound of a train. This is how it always plays itself out. This was good old Alliance, Ohio.

The train whistles would blow from morning till night. Alliance, the town in which I was born, was a railroad town. There would always be the sound of a train in the air. Where we lived on High Street was next to Hazel Park. Hazel Park is now where the Rodman Public Library was later built. It was that same omnipresent sound, the sound that would never go away. It was the lullaby that would put me to sleep. The trains are what would bring the people and the people would bring the factories and that’s what made Alliance a railroad town.

Approximately halfway between New York and Chicago, a span of approximately 800 miles, lies this little in-between town. The train station allows frayed souls of megapolis the chance to disembark after 10 weary hours of traveling time. There are few if any takers. Whenever the millions go from New York to Chicago or vice versa, the whistle from their train daily interrupts the town people making for them a constant reminder that they live neither in New York nor Chicago. The politics of this town is also a reminder that it is neither New York nor Chicago, beckoning the same popular vote that makes Ohio historically the vote that wins almost all of the presidential elections.

This was the mid-stopping place for Lincoln when making his trip from his home in Illinois to Washington. It was the State that President McKinley came from and was celebrated by making the Carnation the State flower because Alliance was the birthplace of the Scarlet Carnation, the flower McKinley wore as his good luck charm and that he was, unfortunately, not wearing when he was assassinated. Knowingly or unknowingly most all famous people, before air travel, came through Alliance on a train. Almost every President, including Barack Obama, has travelled through this city at one time or another by train. This train route from the Eastern Seaboard to Chicago was the first passenger train service in the country.

And while the train would blow its whistle to avoid collisions it was also a reminder that there really was much more to offer in places much further away like Chicago or New York. Even after air travel it is still the same old railroad town, a town of curious mystery where the whistle blows, the people stir a little… and then fall back into unencumbered sleepfullness forever world without end.

But for me, the whistle sound was profound, it was dreadful, it was onerous, terrifying and a constant reminder of my crazy father and the horror that I would have to live over and over again. My first waking moments of morning would be the omnipresent time of my depression when I could only contemplate the terrible, the worst, the utter gloom of all that surrounded me and that which I would have to eventually face once I would open my eyes.

TWO

D AD’S PARENTS LIVED IN LIMAVILLE, five miles from Alliance. His father didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, except for a pipe. He was chief constable, judge and mayor. In fact, he reminds me of Andy Taylor on the Andy Griffith Show and Limaville reminds me of Mayberry. Grandpa Floyd Calvin Beltz was a staunch, upright, choir singing Methodist. But he also had to work in a factory in Alliance