Lament of a Warrior's Son
Leon McGinnis

He didn't look much like a warrior. He was thin, bespectacled, and somewhat bookish. He was too old to be drafted, so he enlisted. They sent him to OCS, taught him artillery, and made him a second lieutenant. He was in the Battle of the Bulge, and held a garrison command in Austria. The war was the defining experience of his life.

He had a hundred stories, and it seems I heard them all a thousand times. He told them well--the Irish gift, I suppose. The misery, the bravery, the stupidity, the mindless horror, the friendships that endured for a lifetime. He could have written a book. I wish he had.

In 1997, I visited the American cemetery at Omaha Beach on Memorial Day weekend. Over 9000 rest there. Large murals try to convey the movements of the opposing forces as they battled over the beachhead. It's a place of powerful emotions. The one that pierced my soul was regret.

How I wished I could go home, and sit with him at the table, looking at a map of Europe, and have him show me the places he went. How I wished I had recorded some of his stories, so they wouldn't have died with him. He would have been happy to do it. Too late, now. Regret.

Every soldier in every war has stories to tell, some more interesting and compelling, but all important. Sadly, as their generations disappear, their stories are lost. I wish more of them had wiser children than my father did, children who would chronicle that part of their family history, so it could be passed down the generations as a living history lesson. It was personal and real, and often inconceivable. The versions in the textbooks and movies are sanitized and distant and tolerable.

We don't know the truth of war. Not his war, not the one in Korea, or the one in Vietnam, or the one in Kuwait, or the one in Bosnia. That's why we allow our sons and daughters to be sent to war, often for reasons we can't explain or understand, for reasons our leaders can't explain to us. When the body bags come home, we have no way to justify the price that's been paid. We come to believe that this price was too high, and eventually that any price is too high.