War and Prayer

 War and Prayer

The sound of the pumping plunger of the Coleman camp stove gas cannister invades my ears, familiar as the pulse of a pump pressurizing my Sting-Ray bicycle tires, a precursor to adventures to come. I sit at the picnic table holding a fly swatter, posed like a sentinel ready to attack any intruding winged insect that lands on our campground breakfast spot. Uncle Al pumps away on the plunger, then stops and screws it back into the stove’s distinctive red tank. The back of the stove blocks my view of his work, but I hear a match light and then the shhhh sound of the pressurized white gas flowing into the burner and then the distinctive whoosh as the flammable liquid ignites and his breakfast cooking routine begins.

He sets a heavy metal pan onto the stove, and a question blurts out of me.

“Did you volunteer for the war?”

He shoots a gaze at me as if I’d called him an idiot.

“I don’t volunteer for nothin’!” he snaps back.

My curiosity pricked a nerve I didn’t know was there. I am like many ten-year-old boys. World War II fascinates me, the “just” war against Fascism, the Holocaust and Hitler’s world domination. The adults in my life – Dad, Mom, and several uncles – served in the Army during the war years, their experiences hidden behind a curtain that only on rare occasions I seek to pull back. Dad avoided combat as an airplane mechanic stationed at a secret airbase in Brazil, but his brother Roman, two months after D-Day, stepped on a landmine and died three days later, a slow and painful death. He is buried on French soil thousands of miles from his Minnesota home.

Uncle Al standing near me at his Coleman stove sat in foxholes yards away from the German enemy, advancing in frontline columns at the “tip of the spear” in Italy and France and eventually on to Munich.

Television feeds my interest and drives my question. For weeks I have been consuming the BBC’s twenty-six-part documentary The World at War. Black and white footage of battles, personalities, strategies, and atrocities flicker on my TV screen as Sir Laurence Olivier narrates the tragedy of Adolf Hitler’s rise and defeat. Footage of American soldiers liberating towns and villages in their march eastward imbues a holiness to the cause, the justice and singular goodness of defeating evil two decades before my birth.

Uncle Al’s blunt, almost angry reaction surprises me. He is a man of jokes and frivolity, more prone to smiles than scowls. His face tells me one truth of his war experience: he would never have volunteered for the hell he went through, and now thirty years after the war’s end, he was making sure I knew it. He was not one of the gung-ho volunteers the BBC showed me, men lined up at recruitment centers after bombs fell on Pearl Harbor. He was drafted.

I sit silently now, waiting for a fly to land on the table, feeling what it means to hear a pin drop. One mercifully comes to my rescue, and the thwack of my flyswatter breaks the silence.

The pan sizzles as Uncle A lays bacon strips on it, step one in his breakfast assembly that will feed the army of kids and parents who will soon stumble from camper-trailers.

And then, as if the sizzling bacon trumpeted act one of a play’s opening scene, a story peeks out from behind the curtain of his Coleman stove. Before he has time to reconsider, words begin to flow slowly, like the maple syrup that will pour over the pancakes still to come that morning. Sparsely. Meaning snuck in between words.

“When I got back home, the only question people asked was how many Germans did you kill?” he says. He shakes his head, disgust on his face as if the memory had renewed a revulsion toward the tasteless and naïve curiosities human beings can have. People who conceive and then utter such questions could never understand what war was really like, his expression said, one reason he spoke little of the war to his generation.

I say nothing in response, silently letting the meaning of his words linger in the air.

With metal tongs, he turns the bacon strips in the pan, then sets his gaze on me. “One time, we captured two Germans, and a guy I was with was ordered to take them back as prisoners to a camp about three and half miles from the front.” He looks down and begins to poke at the pan. “But this guy returns too soon, and I ask him, ‘what happened?’”

He then looks back up and locks his eyes on mine. “The guy said, ‘I’m not walking seven miles for no dirty Krauts.’”

No more words, no more explanation. Just a look into my face to make sure his little nephew understood the gist of his story. An American soldier had summarily executed two German prisoners in some patch of woods off an unnamed road, the crime unseen by anyone, and Uncle Al may be the only one on Earth to know the truth of it. And as I hold my flyswatter before this truth-teller, the war’s holiness that I had built so solidly in my young mind breaks a little, like a crystal statue of an angel that has fallen off a shelf, intact but its wing chipped.

I remain silent while he pokes at the bacon strips in the pan. Even at my young age, I know better than to ask whether Uncle Al had ever turned the guy in, a moralistic question that would have felt as naïve as asking how many Germans he’d killed.

Breaking the silence, he says, “go fill this up,” handing me an empty plastic two-quart pitcher. I get up from the picnic table and walk toward the water spigot on the campground loop road in this heavily wooded state park in Northern Minnesota. As the water flows into the pitcher, I spot the park’s water pump building. Made of stone and built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s, it is as solid and everlasting as Moorish castle walls or medieval cathedral towers, ready to withstand nature’s wrath and time’s eroding hand. Further in the distance is the CCC-built lodge, its stone fireplace and walls made to outlast Uncle Al and me.

I return like a shepherd boy from the well and set the pitcher on the table. A box of pancake mix is there, the words “just add water” emblazoned on the cover. He has already measured out cups of mix into a large bowl. He takes the pitcher and pours water in, starts beating the powder-water mixture with a metal spoon, feels the texture, adds a little more water, beats it again until he senses the right viscosity.

The cooked strips of bacon now on a platter, I watch as he walks the pan over to a wooded area near the campsite and dumps the grease on the ground. He returns the pan to the stove and begins pulling sausage links from a package. He lays them in, and the pan sizzles anew, the smell of pepper replacing the bacon’s applewood scent.

I grab my flyswatter and hold it, ready to kill again.

But like the spigot nearby, I’ve opened a tap inside him, and another story flows out. This time of sitting in a foxhole in the heat of battle, bullets whizzing overhead, mortar rounds exploding.

“I was praying and praying,” he says, the memorized Our Fathers and Hail Marys burned into his brain as a youth pouring out of him. “And a guy from New York next to me says, ‘I wish I could pray like you.’” Growing up, this machine gunner had never learned a faith as Uncle Al and I had. He commits to becoming religious after the war, and my young uncle promises to teach him his prayers.

But for now, New York is obsessed with fixing his jammed machine gun above the foxhole.

“And I keep telling him ‘stay down, stay down, don’t worry about the gun.’ But he keeps sticking his head up trying to fix it, and that’s when it happened.”

Uncle Al points his index finger to the center of his forehead.

He looks down, and in his mind’s eye, he is seeing again the bullet-smashed head, the blood-spattered face, the dead body on the gravel ground beneath our picnic table. New York wouldn’t have the chance to learn any prayers. A non-churchgoer who never had the gift of the Roman Catholic faith, his soul is damned to an eternity in Hell. But a thought enters my mind that perhaps our God is forgiving. That New York’s commitment to prayer just moments before his death saved him from damnation.

“That’s when I had the feeling I had to get out of that foxhole.”

So, Uncle Al jumps out and finds cover behind a dead mule near his hole.

“Seconds later, a potato masher lands in my hole.”

The exploding German hand grenade mutilates New York and would have killed Uncle Al had he stayed.

End of story. And the idea lingers there above the picnic table. God is present in foxholes. Prayers matter. And I conclude, as perhaps he wanted me to, that it was those Hail Marys and Our Fathers that protected him from bullets whizzing overhead and gave him a sixth sense to exit that foxhole before death could reach him.

And then sounds begin to break my communion with him. Voices come from inside his camper-trailer. My cousin, the youngest of his five children, stumbles out, and my two sisters join us having ambled over from our family’s campsite. Each say “good morning” and settle in at the picnic table.

Uncle Al plucks the last sausages from the pan, lays them on a serving plate, and covers them with a paper towel. Putting the meat-pan aside, he sets a long rectangular non-stick griddle on the Coleman stove covering both burners.

His natural smile returns. The foxhole evaporates, New York is gone, and our moment of war truth merges into the slow hum of the day coming alive. He looks down the long table of children who are gifts, small rewards he has received from foxhole prayers three decades ago.

Holding a spatula in his hand, he asks the assembled campers: “Who’s ready for pancakes?”

#