The Flag of My Father

They approached a hill in northern Italy, dead set on taking it. In order for them to advance, this hill was tantamount to the success of their mission.

As they climbed the hill slowly amidst machine gun fire, they came under mortar attack. After an explosion, a piece of molten hot shrapnel pierced his back, severing his left lung. He lay there and thought of his mother, and how he wanted to go home.

He was dying a slow death when a sniper opened fire on his company. Shots rang out and spat up dirt all around him. His eyes burned with sweat and pain seared through is body. “This” he thought, “is how I am going to spend my final minutes.” And, for some reason, he thought about the taxi he drove back home for fifty cents a week. He smiled as he thought about the freedom that came with driving, whether driving around town or through the back roads of southern Alabama. Then it happened.

The sniper’s bullet found his leg, penetrating all of the way through it, almost severing one of the bones. He realized then that he wasn’t as dead as he thought he was, as the pain from his leg wound was far worse than the pain from his shrapnel wound.
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My dad had a far off look in his eye as he told me this story. It was the first and only time I had ever heard him speak of what he went through during world war two. After he told me this story, I asked him if he was scared.

“They wanted to send me back.” He said. “But I fought real hard so I wouldn’t have to go.”
“Why?” I asked. “Didn’t you feel it was your duty to go back?”
“My duty had been fulfilled, son. I went and left a part of me in Italy. God didn’t want me to go back.”
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As I sat here and watched the final thirty minutes of Flags of Our Fathers, I wondered how many people had fathers that fought in the world wars yet still had unanswered questions. I wonder if that is how it is supposed to be, that we live our days now with only memories and questions, living each day wondering if we will ever really know those whom we love.

I look back now and am comforted having had my father for as long as I did yet I have an insatiable longing to go back so that I can possibly “know” him. Now that I think about it, I don’t think anyone knew him, not even my mother.

But that isn’t bad, I guess. Maybe that’s the legacy he and the others left for us all………..to not to know them so that our children could know us through them.