Turning Comments into Blog Posts

For the second time tonight, I've realized that a comment on someone else's blog was really meant to be a full post on my own. This one is in honor of my father on Veteran's Day.

I didn't know until I was in high school that my middle aged father had been a paratrooper - a paratrooper?!? - in WWII. Or that he, too, had fought in the Battle of the Bulge - which even I had already heard of - and had a Purple Heart.

After growing up with one image of my father, as - duh - my father, a quick telling of a story he did not like thinking of even 30 years later (indeed which continued to haunt him in nightmares for the rest of his life), changed him in my eyes forever.

He and several other paratroopers had been spotted being dropped down behind enemy lines and were discovered by the Germans, who then proceeded to line them all up against trees and shoot them with machine guns. Only the sounds of approaching allied troops kept the Germans from adding more shots to make sure everyone was killed...especially when it was obvious that they pretty much were.

I believe one other man, besides my father, may have survived that shooting. The fact that they were at the end of the lineup, together with the natural gravity of a machine gun to drop slightly at the end of a spray, meant that my father was wounded in his leg instead of some more fatal spot. But he had fainted and probably looked dead enough to get by.

And get by he did. Someone even included his life story in a book. (Including even a little bit about me, but not nearly so interesting.)

When he found out that he had inoperable cancer 30 years later, and was given six months to live, he said that he'd always felt - since that night - that he'd been living on borrowed time. And after experimental medications bought him an extra 18 months, he repeated the sentiment.

And he'd made the most of it, with very few regrets. Which is probably about the best you could say for anyone.