Guest column: World War II fathers

By David Magallanes / Guest columnist

A few weeks ago I was meeting with two of my literary friends. One of the writers was telling us about the contentious relationship she had had with her father, who had since died, but with whom she was able to redeem, at least in some small measure, what had been missing for too many decades. My other friend recounted to us the total lack of relationship she has with hers. I contributed to the sadness and regret by mentioning the broken relationship I currently experience with my dad.

There was an interesting common denominator: All the fathers had played a vital part in the tragic Second World War. The three of us were quintessential boomers, trying to find our way through life in this new cyber-era that sometimes still mystifies us, after having been raised as children in the relatively prosperous, low-tech 1950s, when moms stayed home, freeways were being built and society was more polite, though more cruelly and openly prejudiced toward certain sectors of the population. We didn’t grow up with the Internet or cell phones — or even computers.  But we managed to find our places in this new world and learned to contribute our talents.

Although we all loved our fathers, we all knew that we had missed — or were currently missing — something in that relationship. Something of importance and of vast significance.  What impact did that epic war have, we wondered, on our fathers’ behaviors, on the boys who became disciplined men, who became our regimented fathers, who seemed quite adept at withholding  their feelings, who didn’t seem to need us in their lives?

We were all keenly aware that our fathers had been deprived of their youths. They were hurriedly recruited, forced quickly through an intense and grueling training program and then shipped east and west throughout a troubled world, often into combat, only to end up wounded, deranged, dead, or at least psychologically scarred.

One of the writers mused, “Was it worth it for us to go to war and create waves of dysfunctional families that could conceivably reverberate for generations?”

I offered that perhaps this is one of the unfortunate sacrifices that our freedom demands. Freedom isn’t cheap, and in fact exacts a very high price from all of us.  Freedom can hurt. It can even take our fathers from us, though they might still be with us in the physical world.

Military families today deal with many of the same issues, though the wars we find ourselves in since the Korean War are not generally considered “epic,” though some would disagree. The wars today are certainly not “popular,” as was World War II, when Americans across this great land were proud to sacrifice and withstand deprivations of all sorts to support this country’s efforts to save the world from tyrrany. Nonetheless, the wars of Iraq and Afghanistan exact a bloody and psychologically devastating toll.

Seven years ago, I went on my own epic journey. I could not connect with a father who lived an hour away, so I traveled halfway across the world in an attempt to do so. I studied French for a year before I began my pilgrimage.  Alone, I traveled to Paris, France, a place I’d never seen, but of which I’d heard throughout my childhood when my father would regale us with tales of his adventures in a foreign land he’d never even thought about before the war. I visited the magnificent and historic cathedrals he’d visited in the City of Light and stood on the same bridges from which he, too, had seen the Seine River. I took the train from Paris and went into the same little town, Sainte-Mère-Église (“Holy Mother Church”), and into the same little Catholic church where he had attended Mass and given thanks after having survived the landing on the beaches of Normandy.

And then I went on the most emotionally wrenching leg of my journey. It was the reason I went to France, sixty years after my father’s arrival there, under strikingly different circumstances. I continued north and reverently stood in silence on the hallowed shores of Normandy, on Utah Beach, where my father’s survival eventually gave me my life. I’d always had communication difficulties with my father, but here, at this moment in time, I forgave him his lapses. As I learned about the challenges and the sacrifices — some “ultimate” — that his fellow soldiers had confronted, I couldn’t help but be in awe of this man who was my father — a man who once trudged inland upon these sands, fully aware that the German soldiers were intent on mowing him down, just as they had shot the life out of a captain who walked beside him in the water, he once told us.

On the way back, I mentioned to a French husband and wife who owned a café where I stopped that my father had fought in Normandy pendant la guerre (“during the war”). Their eyes misted. And with an intensity I didn’t expect from them, they beseeched me to tell him merci beaucoup (“many thanks”) for all he had done for France when I returned home.

I did tell him. And although we still weren’t connecting here at his home, I knew that I had in fact just come back from connecting with him…across sixty years.

— David Magallanes is the creator of his own enterprise, Real World Projects, a business primarily dedicated to building marketing business networks for the creation of affluence. In this pursuit, Real World Projects constructs distribution outlets for highly reputable products that offer a healthier life and a more vibrant lifestyle, as well as free training and guidance for those who wish to create their own similar enterprise.  David is available for speaking opportunities. To contact him and for more information, you are invited to visit and explore the Real World Projects web site at www.realworldprojects.info

Editor’s note: Please click on links on the right-hand side of the website or click on the Opinion link at the top of the page to see previous guest columns by David Magallanes.