As Far As I Can Tell: Finding My Father In World War II

By Philip Gambone

Philip Gambone, a gay man, never told his father the reason why he was rejected from the draft during the Vietnam War. In turn, his father never talked about his participation in World War II. Father and son were enigmas to each other. Gambone, an award-winning novelist and non-fiction writer, spent seven years uncovering who the man his quiet, taciturn father had been, by retracing his father's journey through WW II. As Far As I Can Tell not only reconstructs what Gambone's father endured, it also chronicles his own emotional odyssey as he followed his father's route from Liverpool to the Elbe River. A journey that challenged the author's thinking about war, about European history, and about "civilization."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rattling Good Yarns Press
• Release date: May 20, 2022
• ISBN: 9781955826150

Book preview

PROLOGUE

Late July 1963. I have just turned fifteen. Though a full-fledged adolescent now, I am still willing to accompany my family on a Friday-night outing to the movies. We are going to see The Longest Day , a three-hour saga about the Allied invasion of Normandy during World War II. Released the previous October, the picture has finally come to my hometown. With all the civic pride of a small town north of Boston, our local newspaper, the Wakefield Daily Item , trumpets the showing as an exclusive engagement in this area! ¹

We drive to the theater in the family car, a yellow-and-white Ford Falcon. Besides my parents and me, who else is along? Most likely my grandmother. Nannà DeVita we call her. She lives with us and because of that she is always in trìdece—dialect for being in everyone else’s business, especially the business of how Mom and Dad should raise us boys. The toll this takes on my parents is something I am beginning to be aware of. Tensions between my grandmother and her son-in-law can erupt into loud, ugly exchanges. They argue in the Neapolitan dialect that is my grandmother’s only language, even though she has been in this country for almost sixty years. At the movies, my mother has to explain what the actors are saying.

My brother Robert, a year younger than I, must also be with us that night. But has my brother David, only eleven-and-a-half, been deemed ready for the strong stuff in this picture? What is certain is that my youngest brother, Richard, who has recently been placed in the Walter E. Fernald State School, a facility for mentally handicapped children, is not there. Henceforth, Richard will be the absent brother, the one we don’t talk about much. He was born with Down syndrome, but in 1963, we say retarded.

Ever since its release, there’s been a buzz in the air about The Longest Day—42 International Stars! the advertisement in the Item proclaims. The picture has garnered two Academy Awards. No wonder the Wakefield Theater, which normally runs movies for a week, is showing this one for two full weeks.

Who has suggested we go to see this show? Chances are it’s not my father, who rarely speaks about his own experiences in the War. Mom is a safer bet. She’s the one who choreographs family outings. Has she thought to prepare us boys for what’s in store? On television, I have seen my fair share of old war movies. Seeing men falling in battle is nothing new to me. But this is D-Day, the greatest sea-born invasion in the history of warfare. There is sure to be a lot of dying. Do they tell us that? Probably not. My parents are usually reluctant to talk about upsetting subjects. (I am not told my brother has Down syndrome until he is almost two, a few weeks before he moves to Fernald.) Still, they must think it’s important for us to see this picture.

The movie opens with the now iconic shot of an abandoned helmet lying on a wave-washed shore. The chilling understatement of that image haunts me. Maybe it’s right then, in those first few minutes of the picture, that I steel myself to the bad stuff I expect will come. As the story progresses, there’s a lot of dying. I watch, fascinated but numb, as scores of young American soldiers are machine-gunned down when they try to gain a foothold on the Normandy beach. In my brief fifteen years of life, I have already learned to steel myself against upset. My brother’s institutionalization, my grandmother’s tirades—I’ve had practice shutting down in the face of unpleasantness. Besides, I’m the oldest kid in the family; I’m supposed to be tough.

Once the beaches have been secured, the film keeps cutting back and forth between the Allies’ plucky daring-do, and the miscalculation, delay, and stupidity of the Germans. The implication is that everything will eventually come out fine. And it does, even for the bewildered, scared—and beautiful—private Dutch Schultz, played by Richard Beymer, who doesn’t get killed even though he’s so vulnerable and skittish that you think he will be.

At the end of the movie, we return to the car. It’s now after eleven, and the streets of Wakefield are as deserted and quiet as a pre-invasion village in Normandy. Do any of us ask my father what he thought of the movie? Do we ask what he remembers of the War? Maybe it’s that night that I learn he did not take part in the D-Day invasions. His division crossed over to France seven weeks later, in late July 1944. Whatever he has to say, it’s not much. But that’s not unusual: Dad is laconic by nature. My mother usually does the talking for him. It’s standard operating procedure in our house.

The next morning, Dad goes off to work. He and his brother run a small dry cleaning shop in a town nearby. They’re pretty much the whole business. It does OK, but Mom has to work, too—she’s a bookkeeper—in order to help make ends meet. When I was younger, I resented that Dad could not stay at home and play with us on Saturdays, but now that I’m in high school, I’ve come to accept the situation. I pass these Saturdays practicing music (French horn and piano), doing chores, talking to my friends on the telephone, and chatting with Mom. Is it on this particular Saturday, with The Longest Day fresh in my mind, that I ask her why Dad never talks about the War? I remember asking that question, though the particulars of time and place have faded. What I will never forget is her response: Your father says it was horrible and he never wants to talk about it.

That night, there is another family outing. This time, we go candlepin bowling at the Sunlite Bowladrome. Like the movies, our bowling nights are a family ritual—but without Nannà in tow. Bonding time is the current phrase for this kind of thing; back then, there was nothing so self-conscious about it. It’s just what we did as a family. It’s a nice respite from having my grandmother in trìdece. While we bowl, Dad tells us how, as a kid, he used to work in his uncle’s bowling alley in Canton, Ohio. Back then, there were no automatic pin-setting machines, he tells us. It was all done by hand. I love this detail, both because it evokes the exoticism of a bygone era in such a faraway place—Ohio!—and because it’s a story, a tantalizing snippet of a story, from Dad, who tells us so little about his life.

Then again, at fifteen, I don’t tell Dad much about my life either. I have already figured out that I must keep a lot about myself private. If the movie unsettled me, if it left me with anxieties about the kind of behavior that will be expected of me when I become a man—I do not let on. I have already learned to lock up so many feelings: my fears, my worries, my shame. I have already learned that to show those kinds of feelings is to be femmenìle, like a girl, the most shameful thing of all.

Dad is an excellent bowler. To me, he’s the picture of ease and sharp eye-hand coordination. I’m a pretty good bowler, too, though nothing like him. Still, I usually manage to rack up a respectable score. In fact, I’m good at a lot of things (schoolwork, music, making friends, especially female friends), so most people ignore—my parents ignore—the one thing I’m not at all good at, which is team sports. That skill, which is really the skill of being one of the guys, I totally lack. Still, I have a sufficient number of guy friends, brainy ones, that no one takes much notice.

I’m also very good at hiding my attraction to other boys, something that I have been aware of since eighth grade. But I have pushed those feelings down, distracting myself with schoolwork, music, and a dozen other extracurricular pursuits. Seeing Richard Beymer on the screen last night has momentarily dredged up those feelings again, but I push them back down. And I do not talk about any of this with anyone.

The most agonizing times for me are when Dad takes us to father-son events at the Elks Club. I suspect he wants to connect with us in ways that he’s precluded from at home, where Mom and Nannà rule the roost. These outings usually include sporting events, and end with banquet-type dinners, where I have to sit next to other fathers and sons, all of whom seem so much more comfortable and jaunty. Most of the time, I haven’t a clue what they’re talking about. Even the food is aggressively manly—chicken and mashed potatoes and that least sissy of vegetables, green beans, boiled down to a dull, unappetizing gray. Does Dad know how awkward I feel? Eventually, we stop going to these Elks Club events. I think the excuse is that all my many extracurricular activities don’t allow for Sunday outings with Dad. Whatever the reason, I’m as relieved as a soldier on furlough.

Despite his silence, I picked up a little about Dad’s service during the War. He’d been in an armored battalion, part of the Fifth Armored Division, riding and fighting in a Sherman tank. In his clothes closet, he kept a few pieces of war memorabilia—his uniform and combat medals, a pair of field binoculars, a Nazi dagger and sheath—but that was the extent of the physical evidence that he had ever served in the War.

Occasionally, a newsletter, published by the veterans of the Fifth Armored Division, would arrive in our mailbox. It included stories and short memoirs, obituaries, and current news of the men who had fought with Dad. My father hardly gave the thing more than a glance. But occasionally I would pick it up, and there I learned, piecemeal, that the Fifth Armored, known as the Victory Division, had fought its way across Normandy, then pushed on through Luxembourg, Belgium, and deep into Germany, where, at the Elbe River they were finally pulled from the front a few days before the end of the War. From time to time, Dad would get a telephone call from one of his old Army buddies. They’d chat amiably for a while, but he made little effort to get together with them. He only went to one of the division’s yearly reunions, reluctantly I later found out. In fact, the whole veteran subculture—organizations, parades, reunions—was something he avoided.

By the time I graduated from high school, I had gleaned a few more facts, most of them from my mother, but they amounted to little more than a skimpy collection of words and phrases: General Patton. The Battle of the Bulge. A nick in Dad’s ear where a Nazi bullet had grazed him. He was so eager to get home he never even registered for disability benefits, my mother would complain. And then she’d add, with a mixture of exasperation and affection in her voice, Your father never took advantage of anything.

Author, high school photograph. Author's collection.

Author, high school photograph. Author's collection.

In the meantime, I was taking advantage of plenty. I did well in school, won a lot of prizes, and graduated class valedictorian. That fall, I went off to Harvard.

During my years in college, Dad and I met periodically for lunch in Harvard Square. He’d take the trackless trolley in from neighboring Belmont, where the dry cleaning business was located, and we’d go to an eatery called the Wursthaus, a kind of German beer hall where knockwurst and pastrami were staples on the menu. Our routine never varied: we always sat at the bar (I wasn’t yet old enough to drink, but Dad always had a beer) and over lunch, shoot the breeze. I think this was Dad’s attempt—more deliberate now than during the bowling years—to have some personal time with me. What did we talk about? My journal from those years, full of disjointed, angst-ridden entries, mainly about my love life, is silent on the subject of these father-son get-togethers. Silence continued to be the leitmotif of my relationship with Dad.

The subject of Vietnam must have come up. These were the years when the war in Southeast Asia, and violent opposition to it, were escalating. (In the spring of 1969, my junior year, Harvard shut down because of student protests, a lucky break for me, who, because of all of the political and romantic turmoil in my life, was woefully ill-prepared for final exams.) While I can’t remember anything specific about the content of our lunchtime political talk, I must have confessed some sympathy for the demonstrations, the takeovers, and draft card burnings. In truth, my understanding of the issues was foggy at best: another manifestation of my habitual retreat into numbness whenever things got too upsetting. I didn’t want to look too closely at how the world I was coming into was challenging me to be more than I was ready to be.

My father, thirty-three years older than I, found less to admire in the student anarchy and lawlessness. But we never came to blows over our opinions. Just as my parents were moderate Catholics, so, too, they were moderate Democrats. While they willingly did their part—voting Democratic, reading the Boston Globe, espousing post-New Deal liberalism—they were not at all ready to see one of their sons go off and get killed in a war that, more and more, they and so many in their circle acknowledged was pointless. What’s more significant are the things Dad and I did not talk about at all. Whenever Dad tried to bring up the subject of my personal life, I disingenuously steered it toward innocuous chitchat about my friends, my managerial duties with the Glee Club, and what I was studying. I completely avoided the subjects that were really important to me: my first sexual experiences, my first boyfriend, my first heartbreaks.

I suspect Dad picked up on my reticence. He pushed once or twice for more information—Are you dating anyone? That girl you introduced us to at the Glee Club concert, do you want to bring her home some Sunday?—but mostly he let me have my privacy. Perhaps he saw me as a chip off the old block, another Gambone man who kept his own counsel. Did he ever recognize a comparison with his own reluctance to talk about the War? I’m guessing here, but I wonder if he finally forgave me my own holding-back by telling himself that each man has things he just doesn’t want to discuss.

When on those rare occasions when my father did talk about himself, it was about his pre-War life. He once pulled out his high school yearbook to show us boys. Where others had listed all their extracurricular activities (like Dad’s classmate Charles Gibbs, a real go-getter, who participated in varsity tennis, varsity swimming, Hi-Y, intramural track, intramural tennis, intramural swimming, and booster club), not a single activity or club was attached to Dad’s name. Jokingly, he told us he was an indifferent student. Just how indifferent, I’d find out years later, when I sent away for his high school transcript.

As if to fill the void, Mom took on the role of family storyteller. Her tales became family classics: stories about making a Halloween costume out of newspaper because that’s all they could afford when she was a kid; about having to wear a black armband for a year after her father died during her freshman year in high school; about never telling Nannà that she played girls’ field hockey after school for fear of being pulled off the team; about becoming class valedictorian; about taking her first cousin Pasquale to the prom because she wasn’t allowed to date; about being pulled out of Boston University after one semester because girls don’t need a college education. You couldn’t stop Mom from telling stories. Your father never got the gift of gab was her way of explaining the difference.

In 1970, I graduated with a degree in English and a 4-F on my draft card, the result of my telling the Army psychiatrist who examined me at my induction physical that I was homosexual. Free and clear, I moved to Kansas City to begin my adult life. I stayed in the Midwest four years, during which time I told my parents as little as I could get away with about my life and my activities—certainly nothing about the relationship I was in or the devastating way that it had ended, a messy, bitter breakup that left me heartbroken. When, in the summer of 1974, I returned to Massachusetts to begin graduate school, I moved back home for a few weeks, but I couldn’t wait to get away again. I didn’t want my parents to know anything about me. It felt too painful, confusing, shameful.

And so the long years of our not telling each other anything important about ourselves continued. In graduate school, I started contributing pieces to Boston’s fledgling gay newspapers. I joined a support group for gay students, started venturing into Boston’s gay social scene, and soon after I got my master’s degree, started a relationship with a man who would be my partner for the next twelve years. I kept all of this from my parents. Nor did I ever again broach the subject of the War with Dad. Always in my head were those words my mother had said to me: Your father says it was horrible and he never wants to talk about it. Opportunities we might have had to talk about his time in the Army came and went, but neither of us knew any longer how to share ourselves with the other.

Shortly after his death in 1991, I came across a book among my father’s effects called Paths of Armor, ² a history of the Fifth Armored Division. In the same box were a scrapbook of wartime photos and a set of four maps issued by the U.S. Army in 1945, which detailed the route the Division had taken. It gives a pretty good general picture of the country I’ve covered and where we’ve been with the dates we were there, ³ wrote Wilbur Berget, a supply officer with the Twelfth Armored Division, when he sent a similar map home at the end of the War. The maps were souvenirs, given to each soldier to show him where he had been.

The scrapbook held about fifty small, black-and-white shots that Dad or, in some cases, his buddies had taken. The collection had been organized chronologically, from basic training camps in the U.S. to his time in Europe—England, France, Belgium, Germany. There were gaps in the narrative (such as I knew it) and only a few captions. I took the book, the scrapbook, and the maps. They seemed worth preserving, but I did nothing with them other than to put them into a box of family documents I was keeping. Eventually I forgot about them.

Fast forward almost twenty years. In the summer of 2010, en route to a conference in Bloomington, Indiana, I made an impromptu visit to Canton, Ohio, Dad’s hometown, a place I had never been. I was finally curious enough to track down more about my father’s life. I located his boyhood home, his high school (now a rehabilitation center); his parish church. The bronze plaques on the walls, acknowledging the contributions of parishioners to its 150 th-anniversary fund, were inscribed with the names of Italians, Germans, Irish, and French. The names were a testimony to the melting pot that Canton had been in the years my father grew up there.

The city had fallen on hard times. Dad’s old neighborhood was derelict. Several houses were boarded up. Much of the city felt neglected, even abandoned. It was as if my past lack of interest in my father was staring me in the face. But my brief visit left me eager to learn more about him. Once I got home, I pulled out Paths of Armor and read it cover to cover. As I followed the story of the Fifth Armored Division, I hoped that my father’s name would surface. It didn’t. The book is a dry, engagement-by-engagement account written to highlight the Division’s achievements and battle laurels: one of the most brilliant combat records of any U.S. division in World War II; snapped shut the trap on the enemy at the Falaise Gap; first division to reach the Seine; first division to reach Luxembourg; first division to fight on German soil; closest to Berlin [when] it was halted on the west bank of the Elbe River. ⁴ This was stirring stuff, but it told me very little about my father, little that would reveal the man underneath his self-effacement and silence—a silence I was now regretting I had never tried to penetrate.

Adding to that silence was the disappearance of Dad’s wartime letters. GIs sent a prodigious number of letters home during the War. In October 1944 alone, the Army Postal Service processed 1.7 million sacks of mail. ⁵ It has been estimated that each member of the military in 1944 wrote about six letters a week. ⁶ By that count, Dad must have sent over 450 letters home during his time in service. Instead, what I had (tucked away in a box of family memorabilia that my brother David had stored in his basement) was a small bundle of six greeting cards sent from Europe and one short letter dated November 15, 1944. Anything else my father might have written had been lost, presumably thrown out. If I were going to uncover Dad’s story, his wartime story, I’d have to do it some other way.

I started with the website of the Fifth Armored Division Association, where I found the names and contact information for all the surviving veterans who had been in my father’s combat command, originally about 2500 men, now less than two dozen. I sent each of them an email, requesting any recollections they might have of my father. Several of the twenty-two messages I sent were returned immediately, marked Undeliverable. Many of the remaining men never responded. One reply, typical of the few responses I did receive, said: I can't tell you anything. My husband died in 1971 and his stories died with him, sorry. ⁷

Then one day in the spring of 2012, I learned that the Fifth Armored Division was about to hold its sixty-sixth—and final—reunion in Bangor, Maine. I contacted the organizer, Galen Cole, who graciously invited me to attend. It was a wonderful piece of good luck. There were only thirteen Fifth Armored vets at the reunion—thirteen out of thirteen thousand—all of them in their upper eighties and nineties. Accompanied by wives, children and grandchildren, they had come from all over the country, bringing their scrapbooks of photos and their stories. One of these men, Clarence Swede Nelson (at 95 the oldest attendee), had been in the same tank battalion as my father. But Nelson had no recollection of Dad. In fact, during the subsequent years I worked on my research, I never encountered anyone who had known my father.

During the Bangor reunion, I interviewed four or five of the veterans. (Later, I interviewed several more over the telephone.) I was struck by how diverse even these thirteen were. Some were quite happy to talk to me; others were hesitant and gave me perfunctory answers to my questions. Some had vivid memories; others apologized for how unreliable their memories had become. Often, ignoring my questions, they told me stock stories that I guessed they had told hundreds of times before. All of this—the small number of men, the shaky memories, the boilerplate stories—left me disappointed. At the same time, it whetted my desire to find out more.

I began delving into the letters, diaries and journals—some published, others not—of several dozen soldiers who were either in the Fifth Armored Division or who had fought in divisions that followed the same route as my father’s. These letters were goldmines of information, detailing experiences that likely mirrored Dad’s. These guys wrote and spoke in a surprising variety of voices: sarcastic, poetic, plainspoken, romantic, graphic, angry, patriotic, frightened. In several, especially in the letters of guys from the Midwest, I heard the same syntax and inflections that my father had used. I began to recognize, sometimes quite eerily, the man I knew in the words of others. I was learning to let my father come alive, as Arlette Farge writes in The Allure of the Archives, in the text of another. ⁸ At the same time, these texts, as rich as they were, could never duplicate all the lost words my father must have written and might have spoken about the War.

With the naïve ambitiousness of an amateur sleuth, I cooked up a plan to travel, literally town-by-town, along the entire route that the Fifth Armored had taken. History should be walked, historian Richard Cobb once wrote, seen, smelt, eavesdropped, as well as read. ⁹ That’s exactly what I intended to do. I wanted to see firsthand the places my father had been, the things he had seen, the roads he had taken. I wasn’t sure how doing that would fill in the story of who he was, but it seemed like the first step if ever I were to recover the incomplete story that my father had left behind.

I also wanted to see, if for no other reason than because they were there—miraculously still there—the great architectural and historic monuments that stood alongside those paths of armor. The war in Europe left much of the continent in ruins. In addition to the millions of soldiers and civilians who were killed and wounded, towns and cities had been pulverized. Some of the great achievements of civilization—supreme constructs of hand and eye, ¹⁰ Private Lincoln Kirstein called them—had been destroyed. Seeing what had survived and what had been rebuilt seemed like another necessary component of the odyssey I was planning.

In his essay History, Emerson noted that inquiry into the past is the desire to do away this wild, savage, and preposterous There or Then, and introduce in its place the Here and the Now. ¹¹ My father’s wartime story, the There and Then of it, was essentially lost to me. I knew I could never render in words—words he himself had chosen not to speak—the precise account of his life during his twenty months in Europe. What I could speak of, however, was what it felt like for me to travel those roads and be in those places—parallel miniature experiences of [my] own—Emerson calls this kind of historical interpretation. I wanted not only to experience what it was like to be at, say, Utah Beach, where Dad came ashore, or the Hürtgen Forest, by all accounts one of the most horrific battle sites of the entire War, but also what it felt like to stand at the foot of the Roman walls at Le Mans, or in front of Charlemagne’s tomb at Aachen, or in the Romanesque minster in Herford, places that had not only factored in the Fifth Armored’s trek across Europe, but which were historically and culturally significant long before the War.

I flew to France to give it a try, one week in Normandy to follow the first leg of my father’s trail—from Utah Beach to Paris—one week to see if actually being there made any difference to my understanding of who Dad was, both as a soldier during the War and as my father afterwards. I wanted to be alert to the physical realities of the places where he had been, places that were at once battle sites, historical locales, and contemporary, post-war communities. What would such conjunctions have to say to me? As someone who had paid so little attention to my father, I now wanted to pay attention to anything and everything that was in any way connected to him during the War.

In his history essay, Emerson wrote, There is properly no history; only biography. To which I, a member of the Baby Boomer generation, would add: perhaps there is only autobiography. Tracking down my father’s story ultimately became a journey to track down my story as well: to track down why I had so little valued my father all those years; to track down my love affair with Europe—this enormous thing in history, ¹² the Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz deemed European civilization; and to track down what principles and values I might be willing to uphold and defend with my life. Uncovering Dad’s story became a journey to find his soul, and mine. In weaving our stories together—the weft of my father’s and the warp of my own—I began to see that I was weaving a text that honored the man each of us became.

CANTON DAYS

1

GREETINGS

Sometime in mid-January 1942, a government form letter arrived at 911 Third Street, NE, in Canton, an industrial city in northeastern Ohio. Addressed to my father, Arthur Louis Gambone, the letter bore greetings from the President and informed him that he had been selected for training and service in the United States armed forces.

As it was for tens of thousands of other men that month, the arrival of my father’s draft notice was not a surprise. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor the month before, and the country’s declaration of war—first on Japan the day after the attack, and three days later on the European Axis powers—had spurred the government to step up the draft. The January muster, as President Roosevelt called it, initiated a call-up of over three million men that year. Moreover, the tour of duty was extended from the promised limit of one year before the war began to the ominously open-ended duration plus six months. ¹

I had known for some time, wrote one new soldier, that the day wasn’t far away when the card would come giving the date I was to appear at the induction center, so I began to take a great interest in the comings and the goings of the postman. ² It must have been the same for my father, who fifteen months before, along with sixteen million other young men, had registered for the draft.

In the weeks since Pearl Harbor, as Dad waited to be called up, the war news had not been good. On January 12, his hometown newspaper, the Canton Repository, reported on the Japanese advance through Southeast Asia. In the Philippines, Gen. MacArthur was defending Corregidor, an island fortress that guarded Manila Bay, against renewed attacks. In Malaya, Kuala Lumpur had fallen and the enemy was within 125 miles of Singapore. Moulmein in British Burma was being bombed. Two days later, on January 14, a Canton boy, Pvt. John A. Zettler, 22, was killed in the Philippines. By the end of the month, around the time my father got his induction notice, American and Filipino forces, the Battling Bastards of Bataan, had begun withdrawing down the Bataan Peninsula. Elsewhere in Asia, the news was just as bad: Thailand had declared war on the Allies, and British and Commonwealth troops had abandoned the Malay Peninsula. The Japanese were in the driver’s seat and we knew it, ³ one soldier glumly noted.

The situation was not any better in Europe. Except for a few neutral and nonbelligerent nations, Germany and Italy were in control of the entire continent, and Hitler had turned his attention to attacking the Soviet Union along an 1800-mile front. By the beginning of 1942, the Russians were suffering catastrophic losses. Meanwhile, in North Africa, Rommel had launched his second offensive against the Allies. Off the east coast of the United States, German U-boats were sinking American ships, twenty in the month of January alone. In every paper I pick up, wrote inductee Wilbur Berget to his father on January 21, 1942, I see the slogan—‘Remember Pearl Harbor’ and ‘Defend America—Buy a Bomber.’" ⁴

While the arrival of the Order to Report for Induction was, as one new soldier’s wife put it, like a darkening squall, ⁵ many young men were only too eager to serve. Ninety-two-year old Richard Brown, who ended up in the 34th Tank Battalion with my father, told me the day I interviewed him that though he had been drafted, he would have gladly volunteered. I was willing to go. ⁶ Ohio historian Norris Schneider summed up the situation this way: It is not hard to imagine the attitude of drafted men. Those of adventurous disposition answered the draft call eagerly as an opportunity for travel and excitement. Others regretted giving up their careers in business and interrupting their education. ⁷

Where did my father, who was twenty-six, stand with regard to being drafted? I have nothing to go on—no letters, no conversations with him, and no family stories—that might help me piece together his reaction. What I do know is that before the War, Ohio had been solidly isolationist. ⁸ Indeed, the main opposition to the creation of the draft had come from the Great Lake States. But unlike a lot of Ohio, Canton (and all of Stark County) was solidly Democratic. It’s a safe bet that my father and his parents—Italian Americans and Catholics—backed the President, whose administration was seen as congenial to Catholics. ⁹ While many Italian Americans had flirted with Mussolini’s brand of Fascism, the flirtation soon waned. In his study of Italians in America, Lawrence Frank Pisani notes that, except for a few die-hards, all Italians here were thoroughly disillusioned with Fascism by the time World War II began. ¹⁰

Still, it could not have been easy for anyone in the Gambone household the January day Dad’s draft notice arrived. I picture the looks on my grandparents’ faces as Dad opens the letter and reads it. "Cos’ è? my grandmother—to distinguish her from Nannà, we called her Nana Gambone—Cos’ è?" she asks. What’s it all about? Of course, she already knows. Everyone already knows. But it’s Dad’s reaction I most wish I could recover. A sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach? A flutter of excitement over the adventure ahead? A resignation to duty? Resentment that he, and not his brother, two years older, had been picked first?

The letter, D.S.S. Form 150, was straightforward and to the point: Persons reporting to the induction station in some instances may be rejected for physical or other reasons. It is well to keep this in mind in arranging your affairs, to prevent any undue hardship if you are rejected at the induction station. If you are employed, you should advise your employer of this notice and of the possibility that you may not be accepted at the induction station. Your employer can then be prepared to replace you if you are accepted, or to continue your employment if you are rejected.

Dad was employed at Troy Laundry and Dry Cleaning Company, where he had worked since graduating from high school almost eight years before. He probably knew that there was little chance of his being rejected. He was well within all the parameters that the Army stipulated for inductees. There was no way he was going to be turned down.

How had he psychologically prepared himself for being called for service? Perhaps he knew guys, already drafted or enlisted, who returned to Canton on furlough, full of stories and information. Before he was called, Richard Kingsbury remembered the day he had been working in his father’s vacuum cleaner repair shop when a friend in uniform stopped by to say hello. He had a furlough from his army training and told of exciting things like half-tracks, personnel carriers, and mounted machine guns that could mow ’em down right and left. ¹¹ Then the friend grew serious and said, It’s the memory of the good things like home, friends, and your loved ones that enable you to make it through the training and maneuvers. Make it through—it was the kind of language that could trigger all sorts of unsettling feelings in a guy like my father, who, in his twenty-six years, had never lived away from home.

During the weeks that he waited to be drafted, Dad might have indulged in displays of bravado with his friends, as did Kingsbury, who joined in several farewell poker and drinking parties. When their diversions got out of control and the neighbors threatened to call the police, the revelers shifted to another house. But underneath the festivities, Kingsbury confessed, You could pick up the gnawing fears that were held by all. ¹² Dad was older than the teenage Kingsbury when he was called up, so his ways of marking the time before his draft notice arrived may have been somewhat more subdued. But I’ll bet similar fears were gnawing at his gut.

Why should this happen to me? ¹³ one GI recalled of his being drafted. I had worked while other people played, and now when I was just beginning to get to a point where I felt that I could really begin to accomplish something I was snatched away from it. Soon he realized—as though an icy, cold hand had been laid on my boiling head—that such things could and did happen to other people as well and so why shouldn’t it happen to him? I wasn’t any different than anyone else. He gritted his teeth and went upstairs to get his things in order. Dad was another one of those guys who did not see themselves any different than anyone else. He would have quickly moved beyond whatever trepidation he might have initially felt, accepting what needed to be done. That was the kind of man he was all his life.

I picture him and the rest of the family gathered at the dinner table that night, discussing what the next steps would be. Did they eat in the kitchen? Was there a dining room? When I visited the place a few years ago, I found a modest, two-story house with a basement and an attic surmounted by a peaked roof. Built sometime after the turn-of-the-century, the house was the kind of dwelling a working-class family could afford. The style, known today as American Four-Square, ¹⁴ has nothing the least bit charming about it. Square, basic, and cheap. From the configuration of the windows, I guessed there were four rooms to a floor. That would make it a kitchen, a parlor, a dining room, and another room on the first floor; three bedrooms and a bath on the second. Out back, there was a substantial yard that would have accommodated my grandmother’s garden of tomatoes, zucchini, roses, and basil. On the day I visited, all that was left of that backyard garden was a patch of worn-out grass.

Let me seat them, then, in the dining room. Winter darkness has descended early, but the house is warm. Warm with my grandmother’s cooking and warm because, already suffering from the arthritis that will plague her for the rest of her life, she has made sure that the heat is turned up. Josephine, the oldest of the three children, now in her early thirties, has just returned from a long day of giving piano lessons. Your brother has been drafted, they tell her. Come, sit down and eat.

Over dinner—there is a pasta course (there is always a pasta course)—Dad explains that he has about two weeks before he must report for his physical. Then, if he passes, he will have a week or so before he is shipped out to a reception center, the place where he will be formally inducted into the Army. He’ll have to notify his boss at Troy Laundry and Dry Cleaning. Someone suggests that he go have a talk with the parish priest. Perhaps, too, someone proposes that they try to fix it so that Dad will not have to serve. Pop, as my grandfather was called, is about to retire after more than thirty years with the railroad. Mom has arthritis. Can’t Arthur claim the hardship deferment? But they are not that kind of a family. They don’t cheat.

I was quite unsophisticated about national and especially world affairs and didn’t really understand what was going on, recalled Joseph Farris, a working-class kid from Danbury, Connecticut, who was drafted a year after my father. And I wasn’t alone. Many of my friends and neighbors were in the same situation. It didn’t take long, though, before I realized I would be playing a part in the war, and I was going to find out how much I could handle in an unknown future. ¹⁵ Doing his part—that was my father through and through.

A few weeks later—as far as I can tell, on February 12, Lincoln’s Birthday ¹⁶—Dad reported for induction. In Canton, the Examining and Entrance Station, the place where selectees underwent physical and psychiatric examinations to determine if they were qualified for military service, was probably at the Eagles’ Temple, at 601 Market Avenue South. In the pre-dawn darkness, the men would have gathered outside the building, smoking and chatting. ¹⁷ Dad would have been one of those smokers. While many young men took up smoking once they joined the Army, my father was already a smoker. Undoubtedly, some of the men were suffering from hangovers, the result of well-lubricated farewell parties the night before. Would Dad have been one of them? Chances are slim. His mother would have seen to it that he stayed sober the night before. She would have wanted him to fà ’na bièlla fegùra—to make a good impression—when he showed up for his physical.

Back in November 1940, the first selectees from Canton—eagerly awaiting their one year of army life, the local paper declared—had been treated to a farewell party by the Veterans of Foreign Wars. In nearby Zanesville, there had been ceremonies to honor twelve local men, the first draftees from Muskingum County, before they went off to the induction center. A high school band played a short concert, the past commander of the American Legion introduced each draftee, and the editor of the local paper gave a short address. But by the time my father was inducted, the frequency of inductions no longer warranted public ceremony. ¹⁸ Dad was one of hundreds from his county alone who were sworn into the Army that day. It befits the modest man my father was that he would not have been given a grand send-off by his hometown.

At seven o’clock, the doors to the Eagles’ Temple opened and my father and the other draftees were let in. Each received a booklet entitled Fall-In, ¹⁹ supplied by the American Legion, a sort of welcoming pep talk to those young men who are just now entering upon the greatest experience of their lives. The tone of the booklet was upbeat, patriotic, and fraternal, absurdly understating the tough realities that awaited the men: There will be lots of fun mixed in with the hardest work you have ever done. You will soon forget the work and the hardships but you will never forget the fun. The many new experiences the new soldiers would encounter would at first seem very hard and burdensome, but over time would prove interesting and amusing.

The booklet included a list of don’ts while in the Army, including injunctions against criticizing officers, being a know-it-all, repeating rumors, inventing stories about oneself, taking government property, becoming involved with the other sex in such way as to impair your health and future, and deserting. A desertion charge will stick to you for the rest of your life. It will deprive you of privileges and benefits until death and then transfer itself to your dependents and loved ones.

Fall-In admonished the men to obey orders, value the traditions of the outfit, choose one’s gang of pals wisely, salute officers as if you really meant it, keep uniform and equipment clean, write home often, and attend church services in the camp and nearby communities. Whenever tempted to do something that would bring disgrace upon you stop and think of the folks at home. They are proud of you. Keep them so. Discipline and morale—the booklet emphasized these two attitudes. When you shirk an exercise, when you neglect a maneuver, when you pay little heed to an explanation, you are endangering your own life and, even worse, the lives of every man in your outfit.

My guess is Dad took all of this pretty seriously. While he certainly knew how to be cynical (nothing ticked him off more than snobbishness and pretension), his basic instinct was to be respectful, conscientious, and cooperative. That list of do’s and don’ts pretty much describes who he already was. He may never have been a Boy Scout, but a basic Boy Scout mentality—shoulder your responsibility and be a team player—permeated his take on life.

For a few months when I was in junior high school, I was a Boy Scout. My primary motivation for joining was the fact that my best friend was a scout. I admired everything about Bobby—his intelligence, his talents, his sense of humor, and easily worn masculinity. Bob exuded a relaxed confidence. If that’s what scouting was about, I wanted in. Besides, I liked the paraphernalia that went along with membership—the neckerchiefs and neckerchief slides, the merits badges, and shoulder patches, even the web belts with their distinctive clip-release buckles.

I do not remember what my parents said about my joining the Scouts. I suspect my mother was a bit leery of the rough and tumble of it all, but agreed to my joining because she wanted to nurture my interests, whatever they might be. My guess is that it was Dad who actually encouraged me to join, and who—am I remembering this correctly?—actually spent time with me as I tried to learn my first knots and memorize the twelve virtues of the Scout Law.

"Boi scàuzo! Nannà scoffed, a bi-lingual play on words that dismissed the organization as a bunch of barefoot boys." She wanted me to have nothing to do with scouting.

It wasn’t long before I dropped out, afraid, yes, of the rough and tumble of it all. The thought of a camping trip held little appeal, and the reality of an all-male environment (they’ll see who I really am!) terrified me. My grandmother was elated; my mother relieved. And my father? He withheld his opinion. He wouldn’t have been allowed one in any event, not if it contradicted his mother-in-law.

I’m sure my father would have liked his son to be a bit more down-to-earth, a bit more of a regular guy, less like his sister Josephine, whom I adored. She had la-di-dah pretentions, smoked Benson & Hedges, and had unconventional opinions on a host of subjects. I see my father as someone who, though he never said it, would have wished his son could have fallen in a little bit more with the way things were. Already in this story—this pair of parallel stories I’m telling—I encounter one of the Big Questions whose answer I’m trying to track down: had I gone to war, could I have fallen in?

At the Eagles’ Temple induction station, the chief business was the physical examination, which was conducted assembly-line fashion. The inductees were naked, wearing only a number around their necks. ²⁰ It was the most rigorous and comprehensive physical most of them had ever had. For some it was intimidating, for others embarrassing.

In the year prior to the declaration of war, thousands of men were rejected, especially for physical limitations or because they could not pass the fourth-grade literacy test. In fact, by the summer of 1941, the rejection rate ²¹ among selectees was fifty percent. But with the U.S. now in the thick of it, the requirements were being relaxed. On February 17, Canton’s Repository noted that a new army order lowering the physical requirements for draftees would make nearly 7,000 previously deferred Ohioans available for military service. By 1944, the stringent qualifications were relaxed even more. ²² One medic sarcastically told a GI that the examining doctor he worked for looked down a man’s throat while he, the medic looked up his ass. Only if they could see each other was the man rejected. ²³

Most inductees were eager to pass the physical exam, so eager in fact that in many cases… they indulged in negative malingering, trying to conceal conditions that might get them disqualified. Once the physical was out of the way, the only screening that remained was a brief interview with an army psychiatrist, who had been instructed to look for neuropsychosis, a wide-ranging diagnosis that covered all sort of emotional ills from phobias to excessive sweating, and evidence of mental deficiency. Only four out of ten white draftees had finished high school; a third had no education beyond grade school, but that alone would not disqualify a selectee. What would disqualify him was homosexuality.

Paul Marshall, who ended up in the Fifth Armored Division with Dad, remembered being asked at his physical if he liked girls. I didn’t quite understand what he meant about it. I told him, ‘Why sure, I like girls.’ ²⁴ Later Marshall figured out what he was really being asked. The ultimate question mark of manliness, ²⁵ James Lord, himself a homosexual, recalled. Do you like girls? Or prefer confinement in a federal penitentiary for the remainder of your unnatural life. The business of the federal penitentiary is an exaggeration, but the terror—of being considered a sexual leper or worse, unfit to honor the flag of your forebears—was real. Lord answered, Yes, he liked girls, and was promptly accepted into the army.

Not every homosexual inductee lied. Some, like Donald Vining, came clean with his interviewer, who turned out to be marvelously tolerant, taking the whole thing easily and calmly, without shock and without condescension. The interviewer marked Vining’s papers sui generis ‘H’ overt, which was eventually changed to the less ambiguous homosexualism-overt. Relieved that the ordeal was over, Vining nevertheless worried about the effect on his mother, who is really known about town. He recorded in his diary that some dissembling [had] to be done about the reasons for my rejection. ²⁶

My father passed his induction physical. Hale, hearty, and decidedly heterosexual, he needed none of the remedial medical work—dental, optometric—that millions of other inductees did. At five feet, nine inches, he was an inch taller than the average GI and weighed 151, somewhat more than the average weight of 144 pounds. (Pasta every night.) He had also completed high school, something the average GI had not. ²⁷ With the physical and the psychological screenings done, Dad signed his induction papers, was fingerprinted, and issued a serial number: 35-285-546. The final piece of business was the administration of the oath of allegiance, done, according to army regulations, with proper ceremony. ²⁸

Once sworn in, Dad was sent home to put things in order before he went off to the reception center at Camp Perry to be processed for basic training. What face did my father present to his family that day? Joseph Farris recalled returning home with great bravado, marching into his father’s confectionery store, holding imaginary rifles to our shoulders and yelling out in chorus, ‘Hup, toop, threep, four, hup, toop, threep, four…’ We were masking our anxiety, Farris later acknowledged. My mother cried. ²⁹

Twenty-eight years after Dad’s, my own induction notice arrived, during the middle of my senior year in college. I was instructed to report to my hometown on May 6, where the Army would put me on a bus and drive me to the Armed Forces Examining and Entrance Station (AFEES) in South Boston. I remember standing, before dawn, on a curb outside the town offices waiting for the bus. Other fellows from my high school were there, and I nervously tried to make small talk with them. We’d had nothing in common in high school, and the situation hadn’t changed in the intervening years. I vainly wished that one of my friends were there, but they’d all gotten higher lottery numbers or were away in other cities. The bus arrived and we climbed on board.

My recollection of that day is shrouded in numbness. I remember standing in a line, stripped to my underwear, making my way from one examining station to the next. I kept assuring myself I could not possibly go to Vietnam, that the good fortune I’d enjoyed so far—I’d been, after all, the golden boy of my family, my high school, my town—that that good fortune would see me to a different destiny than the one where I would end up dead in a jungle in Southeast Asia.

I was clutching a letter from my dentist attesting to the fact that I needed braces, in those days a cause for rejection. But aside from that, I had not taken any steps to ensure that I wouldn’t be taken. I’d heard stories of guys planning to go to their induction physicals drunk, or stoned, or wearing dresses and makeup. Others said they would flee to Canada or apply for conscientious objector status. In Lanford Wilson’s play 5 th of July, June Talley confronts her brother, who has lost both legs in Vietnam: You sat on your damn butt and let them take you because it was fuckin’ easier than making a commitment. ³⁰ Those words could well have applied to me. Throughout senior year, I had been sitting on my damn butt, still banking on magic or luck to get me the hell out.

I passed every exam. I was not overweight. I did not have flat feet or a heart murmur. My blood pressure was excellent. I’m sure my pulse was fast that day, but apparently the examiners were trained to ignore nervous pulses. At one station, I handed over the dentist’s letter. The examiner gave it a perfunctory glance and tucked it into my file.

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