He Came Home
Note: this piece was written for reading out loud at a monthly event in our city of Maryville, Tennessee. This month, the theme centered around service in honor of the July 4 holiday.
As of 2024, only about 66,000 World War II veterans remain alive. That’s less than four-tenths of one percent of the 16 million Americans who served in that global fight against fascism.
Sadly, my dad isn’t among them. He died in 2002, 23 years ago.
I don’t want to wade too deep into politics here—but I can’t help thinking that if he were still alive, he’d be appalled. After all he endured fighting fascism across the Atlantic, to see that same threat bubbling up here at home? I can’t imagine how that would’ve sat with him, as if his sacrifice went to waste.
Now, if you're wondering how I can say he sacrificed his life when he died decades later, let me tell you about what he—and many others—gave up in that war.
Dad was 24 when he enlisted. That was older than the typical draftee, so technically, he didn’t have to go. He joined anyway—not just out of patriotism, but also, if we’re being honest, to get the heck out of a small West Tennessee town where he had to watch his old girlfriend date somebody else every day.
He started out driving a truck on the front lines in Europe. Then he found out he could make an extra $25 a month by joining the paratroopers. That may not sound like much now, but adjusted for inflation, it’s the equivalent of about $550 today. For a dirt-poor kid from the Depression-era South, that was a life-changing bump.
Later in life, when I started flying for work, he’d grin and say, “I don’t know what it’s like to land in a plane. The only ones I ever rode in, I had to jump out of.”
You might’ve seen The Longest Day, that old John Wayne movie based on Cornelius Ryan’s book. It tells the story of the 82nd Airborne Division during D-Day. If you’ve seen it, you’ve seen a dramatization of men my dad knew—but you won’t find anyone playing my dad.
That’s because he wasn’t there.
He’d been captured earlier in 1944 during the Battle of Anzio, another bloody amphibious landing in Italy. He was already a prisoner of war when his buddies jumped into Normandy.
Ironically, that may have saved his life.
The 504th Regiment—his unit—was worn out from fighting their way up the Italian peninsula. They’d just helped liberate Rome two days before D-Day, so they were swapped out. The 508th took their place, parachuting in behind enemy lines near Sainte-Mère-Église and the Merderet River. Over 2,000 men jumped. By the end of the day, more than 1,000 were dead, wounded, or missing. Three hundred and seven were confirmed killed.
Their sacrifice is obvious. Less visible are the scars carried by people like my dad.
After Dad’s capture, he and the other prisoners were packed into cattle cars and shipped north with hundreds of others, like livestock, or mannequins in a broken boxcar display—forced to stand for hundreds of miles, with no space to lie down, no longer treated as human beings. He spent sixteen months in POW camps in Poland and what would become East Germany. Starvation became a way of life. It all culminated in what history calls the Stalag Luft IV Death March.
Not as famous as Bataan, but no less brutal.
In February 1945, about 6,000 Allied prisoners were marched 500 miles through the worst of winter. Blizzards. Temperatures around -13°F. No shelter. No proper clothing. Barely any food. No medical care. Forced to stay ahead of the advancing Red Army—expendable, as far as their captors were concerned. Roughly 1,300 men died on that march. From exposure. From typhus and dysentery. From exhaustion. From starvation. And even, tragically, from friendly fire by Allied aircraft that couldn’t distinguish POWs from enemy columns.
Dad made it through. But it cost him something essential.
He rarely talked about any of it while I was growing up. But in the final years of his life, he started opening up—mostly after he reconnected with some of the other old-timers through the American Ex-POWs group.
That’s when I learned he’d been in one of those columns that was mistakenly attacked by Allied planes. Thirty men died instantly. Three more died of their wounds. Forty-three were injured. He was one of the lucky ones.
He told me about the night they were housed in a barn. He found a hen’s nest with six eggs and ate them raw. It was the first real protein he’d had in weeks.
And he told me about the day they were liberated.
They were marching—double file, guards on either side—when suddenly, the German guards just… peeled away. Without a word, they handed over control to British troops. For a moment, the prisoners kept marching, unsure what had just happened. Then it sank in. They were free. Tears. Laughter. And finally—food. Real food, slowly reintroduced so they wouldn’t die from eating too fast after so many months of near-starvation.
And then, they were shipped home.
No counseling. No reintegration. No diagnosis of PTSD—because we didn’t have that term yet. They were just told, “Thanks for your service,” handed a discharge paper, and sent back to figure out how to live again.
So yes, my dad came home. And I am profoundly grateful. So were my grandparents—especially during the four months they didn’t even know if he was alive. He was listed as Missing in Action for a long, long time.
But let me tell you: though he lived until 2002, the war followed him home. It lived in his bones. It showed up in the silence that wrapped around him like armor. It showed up in the shell he carried, a shell that only cracked when he gathered with others who’d been through the same things.
In those last years, he found a little joy again. The American Ex-POWs chapter in West Tennessee met monthly at the buffet in Casey Jones Village. I’d go with him sometimes. I got to witness something special—old men swapping stories, laughing like boys, bonding over pain and memory and perseverance.
And one detail always stuck with me: when the meeting ended and everyone left the dining room, there wasn’t a single crumb of food left on any plate. Not one.
Yes, Dad came home. But a piece of him stayed on those battlefields in Italy and along that frozen 500-mile march across Europe.
And he wasn’t the only one.
You had one like him here in East Tennessee. If you drive down Robert C. Jackson Drive in Maryville, you’ll see a road named for Paul Lankford—a local hero who survived the Bataan Death March. He never asked for that recognition, but I’m glad it’s there.
I wish something like that honored my dad back in Trenton, Tennessee. But he wouldn’t have wanted it. He just wanted to live his life in peace.
And while I miss him terribly, I’m honestly relieved he didn’t live to see what’s happening in our country now.
He fought to stop fascism. He believed in democracy. He believed in decency. He believed, as so many of his generation did, that America could live up to its ideals.
I still believe that. I have to.
And I hope we can find the courage—the kind of courage that once leapt from airplanes into darkness, that marched barefoot through snow, that bore unspeakable suffering with quiet resolve—I hope we can find that courage again.
Not just to honor their memory, but to live up to it.
May the spirit of July 4 infuse all of us with the courage of our values.
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Engage in conversation. Who do you know who served in some fashion, in uniform or out?
Thanks for sharing this - I'm glad to have known him, even briefly. I'm glad he was able to find some kinship with other veterans in your area. This is so timely for the rest of us. I'm hoping that more people are paying attention.
Thanks for sharing, Donn. These stories need to occupy us on July 4th.