First Person : Wars of Generations: A Vietnam Veteran Finds His Father, the Soldier

My journey back to the battlefields of Europe where my father fought started with a phone call one afternoon last June.

“This is Russell Murphy,” the caller said. “I served with your dad in the war.”

I remembered, faintly, that “Murph” had been one of my father’s World War II buddies. He invited me to go to France to dedicate a memorial to the men of their unit, the 29th Infantry Division, which had been part of the D-day invasion force at Omaha Beach. When I said I couldn’t go, he suggested I come to a reunion of their rifle company, Company I, 115th Infantry Regiment.

My father had gone to one of those reunions once, a few years before he died in 1979. After mentioning Murphy’s call to my wife that night, I found myself thinking back to my childhood, to a metal ammo box in the attic of our house in Louisville, Ky.

Box of Mementos

The box was filled with my dad’s war mementos, old snapshots of comrades, his Combat Infantryman’s Badge, Bronze Star and Purple Heart medals, dog tags, letters and military orders, a German Luger pistol and a dagger with the words Alles fur Deutschland etched into the blade.

As powerful as the souvenirs were to my imagination, they had never been brought to life by stories from my father. He wouldn’t talk about the war. Like many youngsters, my three brothers and I liked to play war games, and we had pestered my father on occasion to tell us the stories behind his medals.

The most he ever offered was to tell me when I was in high school to go see a German movie, “Die Brucke,” or “The Bridge.” It was a graphic, realistic portrayal of fighting and dying near the war’s end. I don’t remember him saying, “That’s the way it was,” but the message was clear.

He was silent on the subject even when I got orders to go to Vietnam as an Army lieutenant in 1969. His only advice, as he saw me off at the airport, was: “Keep your butt down.”

I was surprised to find Murphy’s call pulling at me. I wanted to learn more about what my father had done in World War II and why he was so reluctant to talk about it.

I started with my mother. She told me that she wrote my father daily and sent him baby pictures of me constantly. She was terrified when she got his Purple Heart medal--before she even knew he had been wounded.

She also told me that my great-grandfathers had fought in the Union Army in the Civil War and that her father had enlisted in the Army Air Corps in World War I. My uncles had served in World War II.

Although the Babcocks are hardly a warrior family, I was struck by the continuum of war in our history. I thought my search might give me a context to understand how war had affected my family, from Chickamauga to Normandy to Vietnam.

I also found myself caught up in my own feelings about war, feelings I had not confronted since returning from Vietnam 18 years ago.

What I discovered about my father and myself is remarkable only because there are so many other stories like it. They are stories that should be learned, especially by a nation that has such a short memory, a nation whose youth learn of wars from comic books and movies.

And so on a hot Saturday morning in July, I hitched a ride with Al Ungerleider to a reunion of Company I of the 115th in Salisbury, Md. He had been a lieutenant in my father’s outfit in 1944, and, as I eerily discovered, had served as a colonel in Vietnam at the same time and place as I.

Looking for Anecdotes

The American Legion hall near Salisbury, Md., Company I’s headquarters, was filling up when we arrived. I introduced myself around the room, eager for an anecdote--maybe a story of Ray Babcock pulling a comrade to safety under enemy fire. It soon was obvious that many of the 70 men gathered didn’t even remember my dad.

A few did. Ray Bowser of Ford City, Pa., and Walter Hedlund of Lowell, Mass., said “Babs,” the radioman, had been one of the few company members to go through the war without a serious wound. Later, he became company communications sergeant, then first sergeant, the top enlisted man.

My father grew up in Erie; his dad helped build locomotive engines there at a General Electric plant. My dad was the first in his family to go to college, working in an ice cream plant to earn money before entering Grove City College, where he met and married my mother, Jane McNary of Pittsburgh. They had just returned from their honeymoon in Cleveland when they heard about Pearl Harbor.

Like millions of other young men, my dad tried to enlist. He was rejected for officer training because of bad eyes and a steel plate in his foot from a boyhood accident. But by late 1943, the Army was willing to overlook his frailties; he became a rifleman at age 25.

A Hurried Greeting

I was born in March, 1944. My father was allowed a hurried visit to a Pittsburgh hospital to see me before shipping to England. My grandfather assured my mom they would never put him in combat because he had so little training.

My mother recalls that Dad left England for France on D-day plus three, June 9. Once he landed, it took more than a week for him to get from the beachhead to the 115th’s Company I.

He arrived with its first replacements on June 17. The June 18 microfilmed company roster lists the new men: Babcock, Bakken, Baxter, Beafore, Beasley, two Browns (twins) and a Burdon. They were thrown together by the alphabet, so many interchangeable parts. Three of the eight--Bakken, Burdon and one of the Browns--were listed as killed in action.

My father survived, I’ve decided, partly because he had gone to college. Soon after he arrived, an officer asked the new men if any of them had a college education. My father had, and thus became a radioman.

That assignment didn’t save him from exposure to sniper, artillery and mortar fire. But it did mean he wasn’t in a rifle platoon and therefore was not the first or second man over the next hill.

He stayed with Company I until the end, through hedgerow fighting around St. Lo--the Brest campaign that cost 10,000 Allied casualties for a port that couldn’t be used--and on into Germany and the battles at the Roer River.

Surrounded by Death

He kept getting promoted because the men around him were killed and wounded. But he rejected a battlefield commission because lieutenants, who led men into fire, seemed to have an unusually short life span.

The more I read, and the more I talked to men of Company I, the more shocked I became by the casualty figures.

For example, the memorial Murphy and Ungerleider and others helped dedicate near Omaha Beach listed 20,000 casualties in a single division in the 11 months from D-day until the war’s end; two-thirds of them were in the first 11 weeks.

A U.S. infantry regiment in World War II had about 3,250 men. After less than three weeks of fighting, the 115th had lost 35% of its strength: 1,138 casualties. The 193-man Company I was down to 18 men a month after D-day.

Casualty List Went On

The enormity of the front-line casualties hit home when I went to the National Archives and examined nine boxes of regimental records. The casualty list, name by name, day by day, went on for 143 pages.

The 115th landed later on D-day morning and had it easier than many other companies. But once off the beaches, the battles through the hedgerows began. My father joined the unit then, and Ungerleider recalls how surprised the men were to find rows of thick earthen berm, 4 or 5 feet high, bordering fields of Normandy-perfect cover for German defenders.

High casualties were understandable because the troops were attacking across open terrain. In July, the 115th had suffered 1,769 casualties--more than half the regiment’s men.

My father, who had been raised a Methodist and questioned my mother’s Presbyterian belief in predestination, told her he became a believer the day a sniper shot the zipper off his jacket and killed the man next to him.

Murphy recalled he was in a field with my father in late 1944 when 10 German shells landed nearby. They were spared because seven of the shells didn’t explode. Murphy said he later learned a woman in his church back home had said just about then that she would “say a prayer for Russell.”

‘Heroic Achievement’

At about the same time, my father won the Bronze Star for valor. All I could learn of the incident came from the faded citation. It said Staff Sgt. Raymond E. Babcock, 33683916, 115th Inf., was cited for “heroic achievement in military operations against the enemy in Germany.”

His unit had been in tough fighting near Julich and had made a swift advance on Dec. 11, 1944, when he “exposed himself to a period of 4 1/2 hours of intense enemy fire while establishing communication between the leading elements and the command post.”

A week later, the Germans made their final, desperate counterattack in the Battle of the Bulge. The 115th stretched its thin lines north of the bulge, and my father was wounded, his wrist grazed by a bullet.

When the European war ended on May 7, 1945, Bowser recalled he could count only 26 of the original 200 men or so of Company I, including cooks and drivers.

My father came home in fall 1945. He went to work for GE in Erie. Like many other combat veterans I talked to from Company I, he never joined any veterans groups.

My Uncle Chuck, who served 3 1/2 years in the Pacific, said he asked his brother about the war but he had nothing to say. My uncle also told me his brother, the crack rifle shot who loved to hunt as a kid, never picked up a gun again after the war.

I hadn’t rushed to enlist for Vietnam but when I was facing the draft in 1967, I never considered trying to get out of it. I know partly it was because my father had gone to war, and I felt, corny as it may seem, that I had an obligation to him, as well as to my country.

When I got to Vietnam, I was 25, trained as a tank commander and press officer. Luckily, there weren’t many tanks in Vietnam and I was assigned as a writer, then an editor for an Army magazine. I looked on war as an adventure--at first.

Contrasting Lives

The contrast in life between combat and support troops in Vietnam was striking. I imagine the differences would have staggered a veteran of Company I. In the rear, where I was stationed, there were air-conditioned officers’ and enlisted men’s clubs with 15-cent beer.

Thanks to helicopters and the U.S. Army’s rich logistic chain, even infantry grunts in Vietnam got more relief from combat than did the men of Company I. After patrols or fire fights, they could be airlifted to a support base for hot food, showers, cold beer and rock ‘n’ roll.

I am fortunate--I never saw the carnage depicted in movies like “Platoon” and “Hamburger Hill.” But because I was a sort of war correspondent, I went in the field with combat units. I remember images: the moonscape left by B-52 strikes; the guttural braak sounds of helicopter mini-guns in a strafing run; the rumble of defensive artillery while an infantry company dug in for the night; the bodies of dead North Vietnamese troops stacked like cordwood after an attack.

I admit even now that I was attracted by the adrenaline rush that goes with danger and the special camaraderie of war. But soon the sense of adventure wore off, and I was repelled by the death, the misery and the destruction of a nation.

It had been years since I had thought of any of this. It took me a long time before I could visit the Vietnam War Memorial. When I went, I stayed off to the side, pretending to be there like a disinterested observer. I didn’t get too close, because the mirrored granite tablets filled with so many names would have overwhelmed me.

Some World War II veterans seem to think Vietnam vets are crybabies. Former Company I commander Colin McLaurin, wounded so long ago, said he thinks Vietnam soldiers “seem more emotional than other veterans. . . . They seem to think they suffered more for their country.”

He has lived in a wheelchair for 44 years, since he was wounded after St. Lo. I asked him why he never wrote at his memoir’s end how badly he had been wounded.

‘After the End’

“It didn’t occur to me,” he said. “I didn’t think it was part of the story--it was after the end.”

Dwight Gentry, who still visits his paralyzed comrade, said he has never heard him express any bitterness.

I went back to the Vietnam War Memorial early on a recent Sunday morning. I looked up the name of a guy I knew in college. I remember him vividly, though we weren’t close friends, because his smiling face was in a Life magazine story that included pictures of a week’s Vietnam War dead. I walked up close to to the wall this time, and touched his name on the granite.

And I thought of all the veterans, those who died and those like my father and his comrades who remembered. And I cried.

It was only recently that I learned my father carried similar hidden memories. It was the fall of 1979, and he was in the hospital, on drugs, with the cancer that would kill him weeks later.

Suddenly Started Talking

My brother Gary was visiting when Dad suddenly started talking about the hedgerow fighting. He described how his lieutenant had wet his pants from the excitement, concern for his men and terror because there was always another hedgerow ahead.

Gary couldn’t remember what triggered the recollection. But my mother had an idea. Gary was heading off for a month to his job on a river boat and carried his clothes in Dad’s Army duffel bag--the sight of which must have unlocked memories he had kept so long from us and from himself.

My mother’s sister told me she thinks the war changed my father a lot, that after, he hid his feelings. My mother said he never told her any of the horrors he had lived through, never asked for comfort, never cried.

When I started researching about my father, I subscribed to what has been called the Vietnam-without-tears movement. I still think most Vietnam vets came back and got on with life without wallowing in guilt or self-pity.

Trip Was Good Therapy

But I also realize that while I had talked about the war with close friends, I had not confronted it emotionally until my recent trip to the wall.

I think it was good for me; I think it would have been good for my father. I suspect the memories triggered by my brother’s visit to his hospital bed were only a bit of the pain he carried through his life like a hidden piece of shrapnel.

Today, on Veterans Day, I’ll put out the flag, as many Americans will. But because of what I’ve learned over the past few months, I’ll pause longer than usual.

I’ll think about the politicians who have the power to send people to war, and I’ll wonder, especially this year when they have wrapped themselves in the flag, how much they think of the individual lives when they create veterans.

I’ll think, too, of the words on the 29th Division memorial: “Our fallen lie among you. They gave the last full measure of their devotion. Sleep, comrades, forever young. We salute you. Remember us.”