![\"Dad](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/186\/2016\/06\/Screen-Shot-2016-06-30-at-9.03.27-PM.png\")
<\/a>I recall my father expressing mild regret on one or two occasions for having failed to accept an invitation to attend officer candidate school in the Army. \u00a0He hadn\u2019t intended a military career, and he didn\u2019t want to commit to officer training because he didn\u2019t plan to be in the service for very long. \u00a0He spent time in the horse cavalry \u2014 such a thing still existed in those days \u2014 and he was stationed near the border of California with Mexico on the day that Pearl Harbor was attacked. \u00a0There were rumors that two Japanese divisions were about to cross over from Mexico into the United States, and so he and his fellow soldiers, \u00a0who (I assume) were quite ill-equipped for such an encounter, were deployed to resist the invasion. \u00a0Which, fortunately, never came.<\/p>\n
With the commencement of World War II, Dad was suddenly in \u201cfor the duration.\u201d \u00a0One of his other occasional regrets was that, as he saw it, he was passed over for advancement to the rank of master sergeant in favor of an unqualified man who happened to be a friend of the officer who made the choice. \u00a0So he remained a staff sergeant, instead. \u00a0 Eventually, he was assigned to the Eleventh Armored Division in General George S. Patton\u2019s Third Army.<\/p>\n
At one point \u2014 and, sadly, I don\u2019t know where this happened \u2014 Dad was sharing quarters with at least three other non-commissioned officers. \u00a0On the evening that the death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt was announced, two of the other sergeants drank themselves into a merry state. \u00a0A third resident of their lodging, still sober, was a photographer for the Army newspaper The Stars and Stripes<\/em>. \u00a0The two were mugging for the camera, holding drunkenly on to each other and suggesting that the photographer label the photographs that he was taking with the caption \u201cAmerican Soldiers Mourn the Death of President Roosevelt.\u201d \u00a0He was snapping busily away as they struck various melodramatic poses.<\/p>\n My father watched their antics for a few minutes and then quietly asked the photographer, \u201cYou\u2019re not actually planning to publish the photos of these two idiots, are you? \u00a0You\u2019re wasting your film.\u201d \u00a0\u201cOh,\u201d replied the photographer. \u00a0\u201cYou don\u2019t really think there\u2019s film<\/em> in this camera, do you?\u201d<\/p>\n Thinking of this little anecdote at a remove of eight decades, I respond in a curious way: \u00a0All of the four are, I presume, dead. \u00a0Probably long<\/em> dead. \u00a0And yet, at one time, they were so very alive, their personalities so (literally) vivid. \u00a0And it\u2019s the collision between their personalities and the idea of \u201cdeath\u201d that I find odd. \u00a0Although I know nothing beyond this slight story about either the photographer or the two drunken mourners, I find myself liking them. \u00a0(I like people generally.) \u00a0And, here as elsewhere, I find it oddly difficult to believe that human personalities are simply the accidental result of essentially random collocations of atoms, the product of pointless electrochemical processes \u2014 no different, fundamentally, than erosion or oxidation \u2014 and that they simply vanish when the synapses cease to fire.<\/p>\n At roughly the same time that my father\u2019s \u00a0time in the military was winding down, on 15 May 1945 \u2014 not long after the surrender of Germany \u2014 Charles Williams suddenly passed away. \u00a0Himself a novelist and poet and an editor at Oxford University Press, Williams had been one of C. S. Lewis\u2019s closest friends and, with Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, a member of the famous Inklings<\/a>. \u00a0Lewis was deeply affected by his passing and wrote about it in a number of his letters to people like Owen Barfield, T. S. Eliot, and Dorothy Sayers. \u00a0To \u201cSister Penelope,\u201d an Anglican nun with whom he carried on a multi-year correspondence, he wrote the following in a letter dated 28 May 1945:<\/p>\n You will have heard of the death of my dearest friend, Charles Williams. . . .<\/p>\n Death has done nothing to my idea of him, but he has done\u2013oh, I can\u2019t say what\u2013to my idea of death. It has made the next world much more real and palpable.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I have felt very much the same sentiment at the death of more than one friend or acquaintance, and even sometimes (as here) in the cases of people whom I didn\u2019t personally know, and Lewis\u2019s comment has always resonated with me.<\/p>\n At the end of the Second World War, Dad found himself waiting in Paris \u2014 specifically, as I recall, in the suburban area of Le Vesinet, which I\u2019ve visited in his honor \u2014 to be demobilized and sent home.<\/p>\n When my father finally returned to the United States, he spent some time in Minneapolis (or St. Paul) waiting for a train connection back to his home state of North Dakota. \u00a0(Sadly, his youngest brother, who struggled throughout life with alcohol, had mismanaged and lost the family farm, and his parents had moved out to Southern California to stay with others of their children who were already there. \u00a0But he remained in North Dakota with his sister and her family for a short time before he himself returned to California, where he had taken up residence prior to enlisting in the Army.)<\/p>\n<\/a>
My father participated in the liberation of this camp as part of the 11th Armored Division of Patton\u2019s Third Army. \u00a0(Wikimedia Commons public domain image)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n