The first was about stumbling onto an abandoned champagne warehouse outside Paris after Europe had been liberated. He and his buddies were given an hour to drink their fill, and so they did, spraying each other with endless bottles of France’s finest bubbles, “more than the average American could buy with an entire year’s salary.”
The second story my father told me was about his being run over by a US jeep in the middle of the night. He was too tired to dig his foxhole deep enough, and consequently a jeep ran over his leg while he was sleeping, fracturing his shinbone. He was sent to Paris to recover.
According to the story, he would sneak out of the hospital at night on crutches, find the nearest bar, and try to pass himself off as a famous American singer, not yet big in Europe. The next Frank Sinatra, or something like that.
“After the war ends, you’ll be hearing my name everywhere,” he lied.
The French enjoyed his singing so much, a local artist painted my father’s likeness onto the wall of a big Parisian club, or so the legend goes.
I was maybe ten when I found a German officer’s uniform in our attic—swastika armband and all. There were two bullet holes through the chest and two ruby-black bull’s-eyes of dried blood. Even back then I realized there was only one way you acquired such an artifact. When I asked my father about it, I was wearing the SS Nazi officer hat. On the front of it, an eagle perched on a swastika with its wings spread wide. Underneath that was a skull and crossbones. When I was a kid, I didn’t know any better, so I just put it on my head. I thought it looked pretty badass, which was the fucking point, I guess. Hitler Youth. That Führer knew how to recruit, let me tell you.
Understandably, in hindsight now, my old man went from calm to wild-eyed in point-five seconds and began striking me on the side of the head with an open hand. The first pop caught me square on the ear, which produced a loud ringing and sent that Nazi cap flying across the room. My old man never hit me with a closed fist, and I never hit Hank with a closed fist either. Not once.
Outside, my father threw the whole Nazi uniform into an empty oil drum we kept in the backyard for burning trash. He poured a gallon of gasoline on top. But when he lit the match, he hesitated, and it burned itself out between his finger and thumb. He kept lighting matches, but he wouldn’t drop them in. I was watching through my bedroom window. After seven or so matches went out, he finally remembered he had Nazi-killing stones between his thighs and did the deed. I could see his entire body shaking from fifty yards away, silhouetted by the rising flames.
I didn’t fully understand what I had seen until a decade later, when I caught a Vietnamese peasant smearing chicken blood on VC uniforms, back in the jungle. We all knew this guy and used him often to get information only connected locals would know. These people were so poor any one of them would bring you his own mother’s head for a hundred US dollars. That was like ten million dollars to them.
We nicknamed this guy Ding-Dong because he would just appear out of thin air, and when we saw him, someone would always yell, “Ding-Dong!” which he liked to repeat with a huge grin on his face.
In the jungle many of us collected Vietnamese souvenirs. I collected weapons, taking knives and guns off dead gooks. Other guys collected ears or trigger fingers.
That Indian motherfucker who absolutely hated my guts and swore to kill me—as I said, I’ll talk later about Clayton Fire Bear, whose name I have changed to protect the innocent—used to scalp the Vietcong and wear those scalps on his belt. He had enough so that it looked like a foul miniskirt of hair.
But there were uniform collectors too. Some US military guys—like priests and mechanics and cooks and some medics—were lucky enough to never leave the base, and therefore never got to kill the enemy. But they wanted their souvenirs too, so they often bought them from Ding-Dong. Only they thought they were buying the real deal, that he had stripped uniforms off dead VC. So when I caught him smearing chicken blood on fake uniforms, I knew I had him. If I told the men to whom he had sold memorabilia, men who had paid good money for VC blood, they would have slit his throat without blinking, and Ding-Dong knew it. We locked eyes in the jungle, and I didn’t have to say I owned him. Every cell in his yellow body knew it.
I nodded.
He nodded back.
And the pact was sworn.
I’d call in that favor a little later on during my tour.
But that’s how I came to understand my father’s violent reaction to my finding that Nazi uniform in the attic, and the way he shook as he watched it burn in the old oil drum.
My old man didn’t pay a Ding-Dong for his Nazi uniform. He did his killing fair and square and stripped his own dead. He couldn’t tell me that when I was a boy. There was no way to explain to a civilian—let alone a child—why he needed to bring that bloody Nazi uniform back across the Atlantic and hide it in his attic. I had to go to war to understand. Only then did I realize what I had unleashed when I found that Kraut uniform in the attic—and why I deserved to be beaten silly for my actions.
During one of her long bullshit dinner lectures—which my son has many times privately told me I’m forbidden to critique—Hank’s wife once said that in dreams and literature, the attic is a metaphor for the mind and a house is a metaphor for a person. The basement is supposed to be your subconscious. I don’t know about the basement part, but rooting around in my father’s attic is where I first found the key to his darker thoughts.
I still have the weapons I took off dead gooks. Proudest of a Colt .45, which I used to fire into the engines of enemy vehicles. One shot would stop a truck full of yellow men dead in its tracks. The guns I disassembled and sent home one piece at a time. The geniuses scanning the mail were too stupid to realize you could send an entire gun home that way. Military intelligence. Oxymoron. The US government didn’t care about knives.
My civilian son will never understand these things.
My old man died in a lounge chair a few years back. Ninety-two years old. He was wearing the kelly-green Eagles tracksuit I had bought him, along with his favorite throwback Philadelphia A’s ball cap, which reminded him of his youth when he played semi-pro baseball and the A’s were still in our city. I saw my father through to the other side.
My father had bought the bullet a few days earlier. Called me up and said he was ready to die.
I said, “Okay.”
He said he didn’t want to go to the hospital. He didn’t want any doctors involved, because he knew what liars and thieves they all are.
“Understood,” I said.
Then I sat next to him as he died in his favorite chair—a La-Z-Boy recliner. I paid a young, good-looking nurse to drip morphine under the old man’s tongue so he wouldn’t feel too bad as he went.
When he was still lucid, Father said, “Your son needs you. Your granddaughter needs you. Remember that mission.”