It was a different time when I was a kid.  Lots of dads like mine were veterans of either World War II or Korea and had stories they didn‘t tell very often.  I remember hearing about some of the things my dad went through, but I didn’t hear them from him.  Maybe he told Mom and she told us kids so we’d have some appreciation for what was done for us in the war. 

I remember how his B-17 was shot down over Austria in February of 1945 and how he had to bail out with some shrapnel in his leg.  There were 10 men in the crew and they were scattered about.  Dad fell into some gypsies who immediately wanted to hang him, but he then was “rescued” by some Austrian police as I recall and spent the rest of the war as a POW.  We still have a couple of wooden eating utensils he fashioned for use while in captivity.  This was no movie script.  It was real.

It is all still very hard for me to imagine, flying over hostile territory in a big, slow moving, unpressurized bomber, being hit by flak, the cannon rounds that explode throwing pieces of hot steel all around, and being shot up by fighter planes firing machine guns and automatic cannon.  It is hard to fathom what it must have been like to bail out of the aircraft you had counted on to get you home, but is now going down and coming apart as it falls.  You pull yourself to an opening and jump out into open air. The war is still going on all around you, but you are now trusting your life to whoever packed your chute and wondering what awaits you on the ground, knowing that those below you have been bombed by you and your compatriots for the last few years..…wow.

He was more than “just a veteran” though.  He was my dad, the man who years later taught me how to shoot, and hit what I’m aiming at, but more importantly, how to be safe and responsible with firearms.  He taught me how to catch hellgrammites (the larvae of the Dobsonfly), and how to bait a hook with them so you could catch your limit on smallmouth bass.  Dad taught me the value of honesty and honor, respect for flag and country, and how to open my eyes to see all the simple yet profoundly important things for which I can be grateful, like three square meals a day and a roof over my head.  What sticks with me most, however, are the deeper values for which he stood, and that some things really are worth offering your life up to have them. 

I’d say my dad was a hero, but every dad can be one.  You just stand up for, and uphold, what is right and oppose what is wrong.  There is still a war going on, because the devil is still going about like a roaring lion, looking for someone to devour.  Had we lost World War II, we may still have survived German or Japanese oppression.  No one, however, survives being overtaken by Satan.  Thank God for dads who are still in the fight.  Their kids need them to soldier on now more than ever.

Marty Kessler