Sunday, August 16, 1998

Reliving her father's war to save the world

By Sharon Randall

Once upon a time there was a war ...

So began all the stories my father told me about a time before I was born when he felt bound, he said, as a bird feels bound to fly south for winter, to leave his family and fight for his country.

Unlike Steven Spielberg's "Saving Private Ryan," my father's war stories were G-rated. They had no battles, no bullets, no blood or bowels or severed limbs, no soldiers crying for their mothers.

They were about history and geography, not heroics and gore. He cleaned them up, the way he always tried to clean up everything for me.

My favorite was his story about the Panama Canal. To get to the war in Europe, he said, he and his brother Charlie took a train to San Francisco, where they boarded a ship full of young men like themselves -- all homesick, seasick and scared, he said, but ready to do what they had to do.

Sometimes as he told the story he'd trace their route on a globe from North Carolina to California, then down to Panama, using his thumbnail to etch on my memory a line still sharp after 40 some years.

When he got to the part about the Panama Canal, he'd pause for effect, let his eyes grow wide and sky blue with wonder, then he'd describe in detail the locks -- how they filled and emptied, one after the other, to carry the ship and its soldiers from the Pacific to the Caribbean.

Heady stuff

This was heady stuff for a mountain boy who'd never been more than a Sunday drive away from home, and the impact was not lost on his daughter.

When he finished, if I were still awake, I'd say "Tell it again, Daddy." Then he'd smooth my hair with his hand and say, "Once upon a time there was a war ..."

He told me about forests in Germany, mountains in Switzerland, faces of strangers who looked like folks back home. He even said he was sent to Paris to study at the Sorbonne. He didn't mind bragging about that.

But he never mentioned being wounded. I was 8 when I first noticed the scar on his shoulder. It was round, big as a quarter, like the scar from my smallpox vaccination, only deeper and more foreboding.

"What's that?" I said, firing questions to pull from him this story. He was shot crossing the Rhine River in Germany, then sent to a Swiss hospital where he heard about another patient with the same last name. When he could walk he went down the hall to find the man badly wounded, but healing -- his brother Charlie.

Is "Saving Private Ryan" every bit as violent, graphic and offensive as you've heard? Absolutely, it is. And that is how it should be. It's a story my father wouldn't tell me, and one I needed to hear.

In the film, Tom Hanks and his men fight to save Private Ryan. In reality, my dad and his brother and others like them fought to save the world.

The best I can say about the movie is that I wish my dad were still alive to see it. I wish we could see it together, he and I. After the credits, we could go out for coffee and dessert -- on me.

Then I'd say, "Tell me a story, Daddy. Tell me about the Panama Canal."

Sharon Randall is a winner of the American Association of Sunday and Feature Editors and the Best of the West commentary awards.

Scripps Howard News Service