Spoken from the Heart Read Free Page B

captured German Army officers. She thrust the shovel toward one man and said, "Dig." He pulled himself up straight and said, "No, I am an officer," and she lifted the shovel, whacked him across the bottom, and again said, "Dig." The officer took the shovel and started to dig. Each scoop of earth widened the space to bury the dead.
    I was born in November, just over nine months after Daddy returned home, and to me, growing up, the war was like ancient history, but to him, it must have been very fresh and raw.

    My dad came home to El Paso, but my parents didn't stay there long. Before the war, my father had worked for Universal CIT Credit Corporation, a loan company that, among other things, sold auto financing to people who bought cars. Today banks and car manufacturers handle auto financing, but in those postwar years people primarily applied to Universal CIT or another company like it. My father had started out in the Amarillo office and then moved to El Paso to be the district manager, but during the war one of his good friends had been promoted to run the El Paso office. Daddy had no wish to take away his job. The company offered Daddy several other posts, and he picked district manager for Midland. To sweeten the deal, CIT threw in a company car for him to drive.
    Across the United States in 1946, there were thousands of towns like Midland and hundreds of thousands of men like my father. Midland became a boomtown because of the oil, but there are towns all over the country--auto towns in Michigan, steel towns in Pennsylvania or Ohio, textile towns in the Carolinas, other industry towns in other states--where veterans came back and settled to live their lives and make their homes. They put the war behind them, went to work, and built the economy. As kids, we knew small parts of their stories. We heard the adults talk in hushed sentences about neighborhood women whose first husbands had died in the war and who were now married to someone else. I had a couple of friends whose dads had been killed overseas, so they no longer had their dad, they had whomever their mother married next. That was the man who raised them, and most kids called him "Dad." Their dads from the war were gone. Many of my parents' best friends had war stories. Johnny Hackney, who owned Johnny's Bar-B-Q, had fought in the Pacific. Charlie White, who started out renting the house behind Mother and Daddy's, had contracted tuberculosis in a training camp during the war. Instead of going overseas, he was shipped to a sanitarium and his first wife left him. He met his second wife, Mary, when he came to Midland to work as an accountant for the Shell Oil Company.
    There were families like the Hackneys or the Whites on almost every block, yet most people rarely mentioned the war. Midland had American Legion posts and Veterans of Foreign Wars posts, but they blended in with the Kiwanis clubs and the Elks. The adults I knew did not sit around trading stories of the war, of buddies who had been shot, friends who never came home, of men blown to bits by the side of the road, of the nights they were afraid to go to sleep because they might freeze to death in the bitter snows and cold, or of the emaciated Jews in the camps, many hiding among corpses in their rough, striped clothes, and the overwhelming stench of human dead. Only later would I learn that those were the things so many of them had seen.
    Instead, they put the war years behind them and looked forward. I think too that my father seldom spoke of those years because he wanted to shield me. He didn't want me to know, and didn't want to admit to himself, how horrible man could be. He could manage the horrors if he did not examine them, did not dwell on them, if he did not lift the lid of that cigar box too many times to recall what lay within. In Midland, where the sky arced over us in one enormous dome of blistering blue and where people doggedly imported acres of elm seedlings and chinaberry trees to plant