Midlife Irish (28 page)

The letters had a sort of tonal arc. He’s depressed by the army, then bored, then interested but bored, then, as the war gets
near its end, joyful and anticipatory. The last letters are very short—little notes more than letters, cut to fit into the
V-Mail envelopes—and they all say pretty much the same things. The weather is good (or bad), he misses home, and he hopes
that the war will be over soon. He played a lot of baseball with the division team and counted days.

But he didn’t get to come home right away. He had to be in the Battle of the Bulge first.

When I was a kid I saw a movie called
The Longest Day
. It was a very famous movie starring almost every actor in Hollywood. I actually watched that movie all the way through.
The movie gave the impression that after D-Day, the war was over and everybody could go home. That wasn’t the truth.

The Battle of the Bulge was Germany’s last big, all-out effort. Winston Churchill said that the Battle of the Bulge was “without
any doubt, the greatest American battle of the Second World War.” My dad, a guy who wasn’t born in America and a guy who hated
the army and enlisted only because he couldn’t get a job during the Great Depression, a guy who, according to his letters,
marked off the days until his discharge like a man in prison, wound up his military career in Belgium with 250,000 Nazis.
During 98 percent of my dad’s army tenure, the worst thing that happened happened in the mess hall. The food was lousy. The
final 2 percent was a nightmare.

The death count in the Battle of the Bulge was amazing: Sixteen thousand Americans were killed. According to the records,
a lot of them were, like my dad, first-generation Irish-Americans. They were fighting on the same side as England.

Adolf Hitler himself planned the Battle of the Bulge. Hitler, by December 1944, was a man with his back against the wall.
Germany was clearly losing the war. The Russian Red Army was approaching from the east, while America was heavily bombing
German targets. Italy had already been conquered, and the Allied armies were moving through France. My dad must have thought,
rightly, that he was finally ending his hated army days.

But there was one thing left to do. The Battle of the Bulge. Germany’s battle plan was to create a fifty-mile “bulge” in the
Allied lines and penetrate to the Belgian port city of Antwerp. Most historians think Hitler knew he was a loser by this point,
but he might have wanted to negotiate from strength and get a favorable peace settlement. If nothing else, if he was successful
in what was called Wacht am Rhein, he would buy a little time.

The battle that ensued was the bloodiest battle in American history. Those sixteen thousand Americans were killed, but another
sixty thousand were wounded. Hitler had a lot
of his so-called “People’s Infantry,” which was composed of kids, the wounded, and basically anybody left in Germany. But
he also had his elite Waffen SS, who were a trained veteran fighting force.

My dad found himself in a horrible position. He was in the group that was trapped around the town of Bastogne, surrounded
and outnumbered by Nazi troops. The American situation was so perilous, the Nazis asked for surrender. General Tony McAuliffe,
the American in charge, when asked to surrender responded in a famous manner: “Nuts!” he said.

The situation was so bad, Roosevelt actually thought about dropping the still unused atomic bomb. Eventually, America didn’t
have to use the bomb. The 101st Airborne Division was rushed in; they parachuted in a lot of supplies, and, eventually, they
were able to drive the Germans back. Oddly, in driving them back, Americans lost more men than they had when they were under
siege.

In what little I did hear of my dad’s stories about the Battle of the Bulge, certain details stayed with me.

• My dad was operating a machine gun on a tripod. The guy who was supposed to be loading the long clips of bullets stopped.
  My dad started screaming at him. Then, out of the corner of his eye, my dad saw that the clip-loader had taken a bullet in
  his forehead and was lying on his side in the snow.
  
• My dad had three bullets hit his metal helmet within a few seconds. (He hated the army, but, he said, he had to admit they
  made good equipment and uniforms. My daughter Annie still wears one of his World War II coats. It hasn’t lost a button.)
  
• In the cold, my dad found that he couldn’t take his hands off the machine gun. When he did, he left a little skin on the gun
  controls.
  
• One guy had just entered the army three months ago. He didn’t know what the hell he was doing. He was from
  County Meath, near where my dad grew up. After they met, my dad and the guy talked for a long time about Ireland. The guy
  from County Meath got killed the very first day of action.
  

A pretty spotty picture is what I got of the Battle of the Bulge. I also have one other detail.

Once in a while, once every few months, my dad would wake up in the middle of the night. He would wake up in an extreme state
of agitation and he would jump out of bed and crouch in the doorway to the bedroom. He would crouch there for a second, then
he would get up and go back to bed. He didn’t make a big deal out of this, and I wouldn’t even know about it if my mom hadn’t
told me.

The first time it happened it was scary for her. After a few times, she said, she got used to it.

I asked her why he did that and she said she didn’t know. She thought that maybe, back in the war, somebody bombed a house
he was in and the only safe places were in the doorways.

I never asked him about it.

What would have happened if my dad had stayed in Ireland during World War II? Would he have gotten involved in the war anyway?
In America, World War II is “the Good War,” real bad guys against real good guys. There was no other choice: You had to take
a side, and once you took a side, you were in the war.

I read a reprint of an article that was originally printed in 1941. It appeared in
The New Statesman
that year, and I think it states the true Irish position:

“The most seductive Englishman will fail to convince the most amenable Irishman that the Allies are fighting ‘against aggression’
and ‘on behalf of democracy.’ The British cause, to the Irishmen, is simply the patriotic cause of Britain, in which certain
other countries have become involuntarily
caught up through German invasion. It is not a cause whose nobility or whose claim on British lives Irishmen would dream of
questioning. Nor do they criticize those of their own number who cross the border to enlist in the British Forces. But it
is not a cause for which one Irish parent in a hundred will send his son to die; or one Irish voter in a hundred consent to
plunge the country into war.”

When he was old, when someone would ask my dad how he was doing, he wouldn’t say “fine” or “good.” He always said the same
thing: “Getting through life with a minimum of difficulties.”

FOURTEEN

Dad

My favorite American movie is pretty much the popular choice:
Citizen Kane
.

Citizen Kane
still emotionally gets to almost everybody who watches it. I believe this is because everybody knows that they are, in a
way, Charles Foster Kane. We are all enormous onions, complicated, almost but not quite comprehensible. We all walk around
as these huge, multilayered onions. Sometimes, if we’re lucky, we meet and fall in love with someone who wants to peel the
onion all the way down to the core. Sometimes they get halfway in, discover a bad layer, and call off the project. Sometimes,
with miraculous luck, we get someone who actually wants to go all the way into the giant Vidalia onion that is us. And we
try to spend the rest of our lives with those people.

In my dad’s own personal
Citizen Kane
, the word he whispers before dropping the glass snow sphere to the carpet and falling to the floor in death and eternal silence
is one single, mysterious word: “Athlone.”

Closeup on my dad’s lips. No mustache.

“
Athlone
.”

My father was not very much like Charles Foster Kane. Bernard Gannon was a mysterious guy, though, a giant onion. He didn’t
live in a huge castle surrounded by wild animals, but he was a tough guy to figure out.

Athlone
.

Two syllables
. For all practical purposes, that was all I knew about my dad’s youth. He was from some mysterious place in Ireland called
“Athlone.”

When I was a kid, I never wondered whether “Athlone” was a town, or a country, or a big city. It could have been a space station
for all I cared.

“My dad’s from Ireland,” I would say.

Sometimes (rarely) the person I was talking to would ask, “Where at in Ireland?”

I would say, “Athlone.” That was usually enough. The person I was talking to would cock his head as if he knew what I meant.
Next question.

But the older I got, the more I wondered. I looked up “Athlone” in a book about Ireland. “Athlone” was a city near the middle
of Ireland. From then on, when someone asked me about my dad, I would say, “My dad is from Ireland. From Athlone. That’s a
city near the middle of Ireland.”

Then, when I was in college, my dad died and therefore closed his book permanently. At his funeral no one mentioned Athlone.
Instead there was a lot of talk about Atlantic City and South Philly and East Camden.

My dad died in 1974, and since then the enigma of “Athlone” has grown in my mind. I got a picture book of Ireland out of the
library and I looked at some pictures of Athlone. In the pictures, it looked like every other Irish town: freshly painted
little shops that looked like they came out of 1920. Cobblestone streets. Kids with funny hats. Bicycles.

I consulted my atlas and found exactly where “Athlone” was. It turned out to be a little dot about 150 miles west of Dublin.
So we expected to get to Athlone from Dublin by the afternoon. The drive is not particularly picturesque and we drove in silence,
listening to the American top forty. We expected Athlone to be pretty much like the other Irish towns we had encountered,
the two-pubs-a-pharmacy-and-some-bed-and-breakfasts town. It wasn’t that way. Athlone,
while not a metropolis, is actually much bigger than, say, Milltown Malbay or Ballyhaunis. Athlone is also a lot more modern.
In some places Athlone could pass for the city my dad spent a lot more time in, Camden, New Jersey, the city of eternal love.

As expected we cruised into Athlone about lunchtime. We parked by the River Shannon, which flows through the center of Athlone.
We got out of the Punta to explore a town we had heard of but never seen. When I was getting out of the car I almost tripped
over a crushed sixteen-ounce Budweiser can lying on its side on the sidewalk. A group of multipierced young people walked
past. They were listening to American rap music, something I hadn’t missed up until now. It seemed pretty odd to be standing
on a cobblestone street next to a river in Ireland listening to “All About the Benjamins.”

A tall man in a thousand-dollar suit was walking along with a short man in a thousand-dollar suit. They were talking, but
not to each other, muttering into their tiny black cell phones.

Almost immediately, Athlone started to transform us. As we talked, our answers got shorter and shorter. Athlone, against our
wills, was turning us back into Americans. We might as well have been back there in the land of the free. We found ourselves
acting what might be called “the American Way.”

As we walked in our sullen way through the streets of Athlone, it was hard to imagine my dad as a kid hanging around in Athlone.
I couldn’t picture my dad walking around in an urban Ireland. Somehow it just didn’t seem to ring true. But we were walking
around in an urban Ireland, and it wasn’t doing us any good. It wasn’t killing us, but it wasn’t doing us any good.

I started to hear some music from a store, drifting out in front. The Boss. “The Streets of Philadelphia.” It seemed to be
almost appropriate. Then we happened to pass a store. There was a big sign over the door:
GANNON’S
.