Get Annotations, My Substack Newsletter
Join me on Substack to read my newsletter Annotations, which covers memoir, family, history and other topics. Read past entries and subscribe to get each edition delivered to your in-box.
A Significant Veteran’s Day
Note: These are some thoughts from Veteran’s Day a few years ago, after a research trip to Italy.
Today I feel the loss of my father more acutely than ever. I have been studying World War II, especially the Anzio campaign, reading first-hand accounts and historical recounting, and especially poring over the pictures. Most are grainy black-and-whites that don’t give a crisp image of the action, but rather reflect the extreme desperation it must have taken to send people to war. Engaging in war, for honorable people, must be borne out of desperation, because it results in inconceivable hardship, suffering, damage and death. Whole villages and towns are destroyed, their people scattered or shipped off or forced to live in caves or camps. Families are torn apart.
The soldiers and their families, too, if they are reunited, are traumatized in one way or another: the soldiers with their wounds, disabilities, haunting memories and grim outlook; the spouses with their own recollection of the hardships endured while their soldier was away, keeping home and family together, and now with the burden of living with, caring for and trying to love a person who is changed forever. Haunted. Less than whole. The children may have the innocence of their years stripped away, or at least buried under a mound of responsibility, vague feelings of dread and sadness. They may be robbed of the calm, steady future that a contented, well-adjusted family would provide.
Perhaps I’m talking about my own family, my own life. My family didn’t begin until after the war, when my dad had already been wounded, hospitalized and repaired as best they could. By age thirty-two he had been through the horrors of bombs and night raids and endless days in the freezing mud. He had seen other soldiers and platoon buddies torn apart by enemy fire, the life drained out of them. He had killed. And ordered others to kill.
My mother, too, before she met him, had seen the ravages of war from the homefront. She’d listened to radio reports and read the news, constantly worried over the fate of two brothers and countless other friends and family fighting in the war. She had endured rationing, seen the parade of wounded men coming back, knew families whose boys had not returned, and imagined the horrors of a world where our side would not prevail. The war started when she was eighteen, at the point where boys and dances and school and starting a family should have been occupying her mind, but instead it was no doubt filled with more sober thoughts. She went to work instead of college, with her pay going to help her mother pay the bills.
It is my father’s trek and his wartime experiences that has me most curious. I’m dwelling on what he must have seen and done and gone through—those things that changed him, brought him back to again be a farmer and look over the rolling hills of western North Dakota. They say men coming back from war can never find life too quiet, and looking at the land around the farm, he must have seen it in a different way. Was it overlaid with another landscape, one where ditches were filled with men in helmets and behind every tree was a camouflaged gun or tank or ammo truck? Did the old gravel roads look just as those did in Italy before artillery shook the ground and cratered the pathways into useless fields of rubble? When he looked into the distance, did he imagine flashes of light and smoke tearing apart the opposite hillside? What did he expect to see coming down the road?
The land on which he fought the Anzio campaign was flat and nearly treeless, rising to the Lepini Hills where the Nazis held the high ground. The plains had been marshes, drained by the government to create farmland. Onto the land sprung up farmhouses and tiny villages. In that way, the terrain was not unlike North Dakota. And into that rural landscape, the soldiers would swarm to engage the enemy. They would sneak up on the farmhouses at night, faces smeared with sooty black, to rout the enemy and drive them back, or capture or kill them. A simple farmhouse, the symbol of his youth and his legacy, became the front line in my father’s war. The home and hearth became the source of grim, determined actions where one could easily die.
Later, as the front lines advanced toward Rome, the soldiering was done in the hills and mountains, taking the high ground to gain advantage and flush the enemy out of the war-torn land. The muddy fields were replaced by rocky paths and unknown peril that perhaps lay just over the next wooded mountain ridge. Villages built vertically onto those mountains became warrens of enemy hideaways, with narrow cobblestone streets and rough stone houses serving as perfect sites for ambushes. And always, at the top, a nest of guns—machine guns, artillery—aimed at anyone daring to approach.
Dad walked that path daily for four months at Anzio, fighting in a campaign that went finally off the beachhead, in through the flat marshes, up and down the craggy hills and, town by town, capturing rivers and roads and railroads, inexorably toward Rome. He sat for days under freezing rains, slogged through muck, heard the constant barrage of airplanes, missiles, gunfire and bombs, and certainly the screaming of orders and agony.
What can I learn of my dad through all of this? Who was he before he went into it, and how did it change him? What I can sense, without knowing him as an adult or being able to ask him and observe him answering those questions, is that he performed with determination and valor. He swallowed his doubts and fears, probably on a daily basis, and kept moving forward, driven by duty to just do the job. He could not have done otherwise and come out of it.
Perhaps that’s the definition of courage, and perhaps that’s really what I’m looking for. What it takes to conquer an unknown foe, whether internal, external, or both.
A New Chapter
I’ve turned a page in my writing life with my history-based memoir, All Roads Lead to Rome: Tracing the Mysteries of My Father’s Battles. It chronicles my journey across my father’s battlefields as I sought to rediscover him and understand his part in one of our most storied military units of World War II, the First Special Service Force.
Let’s start with this: Here’s my dad, Erick Gabriel Thorness:
