We Who Are Alive and Remain (35 page)

It’s all a bit of a blur after that. I recall the evening I got home. My mother and I sat at the kitchen table trying to make sense of what had happened. She was inconsolable.

My father had shot himself in the head with a small-caliber pistol. The bullet entered from the left temple and passed behind his eyes out the other side of his head, severing the optic nerves and leaving him blind. I found this rather odd; my father was right-handed.

Because of my political beliefs, I had been out of touch with my dad for some years, so I didn’t really know what was happening in his personal life preceding his suicide attempt. I don’t know why he chose to do what he did. I asked my mom if she knew, although I didn’t want to probe too much. It’s true he could be overly private, even controlling at times. To this day she is not certain why he did what he did. She postulated that he thought he had cancer and was unwilling to get tested for the disease. He was not divorced from my mother yet, as some people suggest; that happened later.

Dad was moved to a VA assisted-living facility in Waukegan, Illinois, where he lived out his remaining years. He was fully ambulatory but in and out of being lucid, sometimes in a semivegetative state. He had friends in the VA ward, though the living conditions at the VA were horribly depressing. The place was in a state of disrepair, like the men who inhabited it.

It is true that his immediate family was not in attendance when he died in 1987. To my knowledge there was not a service. Our contact with him had waned over the years, and when he passed, we were unaware of the event. His sister attended to the details. It was days, perhaps even a week, after he died that his sister phoned my mom to let her know. The death certificate listed malnutrition as the cause. He was cremated. He had spent the last seventeen years of his life in the VA assisted-living facility.

I recognize this might sound a bit strange, but my father’s death seemed anticlimactic to me. The passage of time had served to distance him from his family. I was living on Maui at the time. My mother and father were divorced by then. She remarried in 1995, at age seventy-five. She married a wonderful man and enjoyed eight fantastic years with Bert before he died. I find it remarkable and heartwarming that she chose to find love again after the heartache she had been through. To this day I admire her inner strength and unwavering support for her sons.

I think my father and I reconciled our differences partially before he died and partially after. One of the last times I saw him in the hospital I gave him a gold coin, a small memento of a trip to Guatemala I had been on, and some money for his personal needs. I think he received it well. I believe now, even in death, my father is closer to me than ever. I respect his strength and guidance. I’m thankful for the father I had.

I think what the
Band of Brothers
has done (as well as movies such as
Saving Private Ryan
) is to reframe the honor due the men and women who serve our country in the military. Look at the way Vietnam ripped this country apart. I was a perfect example of that—strongly disagreeing with the war and even with the soldiers who were in it.

Today, when I realize what these men and women endure for our country, whether you disagree or agree with the wars our country takes part in, the people who serve in our military are heroes.
Band of Brothers
helped heal the ripped soul of this nation. It helped make this country patriotic again. In the big picture, it’s a wonderful thing to have happened to us as a nation.

What really brought this together for me personally was this: today I have a six-year-old daughter, Sophia Rose, whom I took to Disney World last December. A job fair for returning veterans (from Operation Iraqi Freedom) was being held in the Dolphin Hotel, where we were staying. My daughter saw a poster for this and said, “Daddy, that’s the army, isn’t it? I want to meet the army.” When I asked why, she said, “Because we sent them cards.” This was late evening already. Nearby sat a veteran in a wheelchair. He was young, handsome, and athletic, though missing a leg. My daughter went to him and asked, “You’re army—right?”

He said, “Yes, I am.”

My daughter hugged him. “Thank you,” she said.

Tears welled in the man’s eyes.

“Did you get my card?” she asked. “My school sent you a card. It said, ‘Thank you for saving our Earth.’ ”

The guy just about lost it. He said, “You’re welcome. Yes, we did get your card. Thank you for doing that.”

Sophia chatted with him for a few minutes. It was getting quite late by then. Sophia said, “Daddy, I want to meet all the army.”

The man pulled me aside. “Sir, I have to warn you that many of the men here are horribly disfigured—burn victims, triple amputees. I don’t know if it’s appropriate, but you can make the call.” This was just outside the meeting room.

I called my daughter over and said, “Honey, many of these men were badly hurt in the war. It may be frightening for you.”

She said, “That’s okay, Daddy. I want to meet them.”

We went into the hall where the veterans were. The first man my daughter came to was a burn victim whose face had been all but annihilated. She went up to him without saying a word and hugged him. He just looked down at her. “Thank you,” she said. The man started to cry.

She went to another man, who was missing a leg. “What happened to you?” she asked. There was gentleness in her voice.

“A bomb went off,” the man said quietly.

Sophia hugged him. “You’ll be okay,” she said, then repeated it.

Sophia went from man to man that evening, hugging them, thanking the veterans for their service. There wasn’t a dry eye in the room.

We spent about an hour there the first night. It was about midnight when we left. We spent three more days at Disney World, and each evening when we came back to the hotel she asked to return to the hall and thank more veterans.

That’s the picture I hold in my mind today. Regardless of anybody’s political views, these men are true heroes, not only as patriots but also as human beings, for who they are, what they have been through, and what they’ve endured.

My father never talked about World War II, like many of the men who returned from the war. For years all I knew was that he was in the 101st Airborne, that he jumped out of a plane on D-day, and that he participated in the Battle of the Bulge. He simply didn’t talk about his experiences in combat. I knew much more about his later years with the CIA, which is funny because he wasn’t supposed to talk about those experiences.

As much as he didn’t talk about war, it was always the backdrop of our life. As a kid growing up in the 1960s, I remember my father dragging us to all these World War II movies, especially ones that focused on D-day. I could see he was proud. And I was proud, too—I told people that my father jumped onto the beaches of Normandy, which of course wasn’t exactly true—the paratroopers didn’t jump onto the beaches. But that’s all I knew as a child.

The things I’ve learned about my father’s World War II days have all come as part of an emotional journey for me today. Over the years I’ve met people, found papers and letters, and read about him in books and magazine articles. Last Christmas, Dick Winters sent many of the families copies of letters and other documents he had collected about the men of Easy Company. There is a great story about my dad from [the late] Carwood Lipton. Bill Guarnere had a copy of it in boxes of papers that he saved and gave it to me. It reads as follows:

To me, that’s such a powerful image: Carwood Lipton and my dad running through the woods and getting shot at—but they’re making a game out of it. Dad was always like that, so full of life, with so much presence and charisma. He was someone who walked into a room and every eye was drawn to him.

People I hardly know or have never met before tell me that Dad was their hero. Others save his letters—I’ve collected copies of them written throughout the decades of his life. The other day, completely out of the blue, I got an e-mail from a man who tracked me down through an Easy Company Web site. The man’s father came to California from Australia in the 1960s to train with the army rangers. I remembered the man’s father when I was about ten when he came to our house, but other than that we’ve had no contact over the years. In the e-mail the son said, “My father just passed away. He talked about your father until the day he died.”

That was the type of impact my father had on people.

My father was born May 2, 1924, in Tacoma, Washington, and lived there until about age seven, when his family moved to Los Angeles, where he grew up. My grandfather was a chemical engineer with Kodak. The family had a bit of money. They rented a house at the beach every summer. In many ways my dad had a privileged upbringing.

Dad’s full name was Robert Burr Smith. Burr wasn’t a nickname, even though some of the men put “Burr” in quotes when they write it. Burr was one of his grandmother’s or aunt’s names. Dad’s father’s name was also Robert. Burr is also my son’s middle name today.

When my dad was fourteen, as the story goes, he and a friend were fooling around one day acting like German soldiers and painted swastikas somewhere and yelled “Heil Hitler!” My grandmother was furious and sent him to Brown Military Academy in Pacific Beach, California, so he could learn how to be patriotic.

The summer he turned eighteen, Dad enlisted in the army, on August 18, 1942, and quickly signed up to be a paratrooper. He entered from Rochester, New York, where his parents had moved that summer. On the way down to Georgia for basic training he supposedly met and became friends with Warren “Skip” Muck, who was later killed at Bastogne.

Years after the war and just before he passed away, my father started work on a memoir titled “One Last Look Back.” He wrote a few pages only, among them a description of Camp Toccoa, where he trained:

Many of the men have told me that when my father first showed up in the army, he came in as this good-looking, well-educated, well-read, Southern California kid—and they all thought he was going to be a real highbrow. Bill Guarnere has said to me that Dad was really skittish when he first showed up, so “Wild” Bill stuck a gun or bayonet under his neck and said, “It’s either kill, or be killed, kid.” Dad lost his skittishness really fast after that. He won them over and turned out to be a strong soldier in the end, the men say.

My sister Sandra has kept my father’s original jump journal. I don’t know why Dad stopped writing it other than things got busy with the war, obviously. He writes of his feelings about parachute training: