“Dad loved it, there was a place for everything. I was Dad’s Platoon Leader. I was 11.”
DAD WAS A GROUND CREW OFFICER for the P-38 fighters in World War II as they went into England, France, Belgium and Germany, escorting the Allied bombers that chased Hitler back into his final bunker. There was a place for everything: P-38 parts, gasoline, engine oil, maps, food and water, foxholes and shovels. Some P-38s made it home to their temporary airfields, some came in on their bellies, their landing gear shot out from under them, some exploded on impact, some never made it at all. Overnight they’d be repaired and go out again on their bombing escort missions in the morning.
Within a day or two of the end of the war in 1945, all was in disarray. A grenade exploded and Dad was blown all over the airfield. He lost fragments of his right jaw and teeth, his right optic nerve was severed, and exploding shrapnel took away his right and left hands. They took him to a field hospital and called the Christian Science practitioner. Dad said, “Not yet, Padre, don’t be cleansing me to die. Not yet.”
Dad woke up on a ship going home and then in a rehab hospital in Utah. Mom and I traveled by train to Utah several times from San Leandro. Mom taught me to sing, “Don’t Fence Me In,” from a Gene Autry movie of the time. I remember the crunch of the snow and the smell of trains in the winter.
Dad returned home with aluminum hooks for hands and they bought a little stucco, post-WWII house in San Leandro’s Victoria Gardens off Davis Street. Brother Jim arrived soon after and then Brother Tom. Brother Mike was still a dream away. When we outgrew that little home, we moved to hot and sunny Walnut Creek in 1953. Dad now had his Army/Air Force “troops,” and everything again had its place.
I was now 11 and Dad’s Platoon Leader. He had three sons standing, “bracing” in the hallway. Drill Instructor Major Philip R. Bray, USAF (Ret.), was addressing his troops on a Saturday morning: “Get your shoulders, backs and butts, your calves and heels against the wall. Stand at attention! Hands along your pant seams. Reach for the ground, Soldier, fingertips along your seams, pointed to the ground. Suck in that gut! Are you pregnant, Soldier?”
Naturally we’d laugh. Dad was a funny guy and we were “his troops.” We hadn’t done this drill for a couple of weeks, but we all knew the routine and it was always good for a laugh.
Jimmy next to me giggled. We all did. Dad moved in front of Jimmy, eyeball to eyeball, and continued: “Wipe that smile off your face, Soldier. Throw it on the ground. Step on it!”
What? Did we DARE leave formation and step on a thrown, imaginary smile?
Dad repeated the order. Jimmy stepped forward and stepped on the imaginary smile he had just thrown to the hallway floor.
“Dismissed, and meet me outside.”
Aw, crap! It was Saturday, and breakfast and “bracing in the hallway” were over and our workday was about to start.
One by one we received our instructions: “Peter, go get the wheelbarrow. Jimmy, go get the shovel. Tom, go get the rake and meet me at the Humus Pile.”
From there I was assigned to go dig a hole in the front yard while Jim and Tom loaded fertile humus from the compost pile into the wheelbarrow. Soon I figured out what we were doing: transplanting a tree from the back yard to the new hole I’d dug in the front yard.
Two boys followed Dad, who had the tree and humus, his aluminum hooks easily directing the wheelbarrow, the other “troops” bringing the tools. We all met up in the front yard and planted the tree. Mom looked up from her nearby freshly planted bedding plants and said, “Good job, Boys,” meaning all four of us.
The Saturday work went on for another hour or so until Dad said those cherished words: “OK, put the tools away.” It was over, we could leave Phil Bray’s Army/Air Force — until the next chore list was assembled.
Nice to have had a mentor who tested your mettle, and metal, every way to Sunday
Dad was blown up on May 3, 1945; the war was over in Europe on May 4 or 5, I think. I was born in Bryn Mawr, Pa., on Jan. 30, 1943, when they were in Wayne, Pa., where he went to OCS, Officer Candidate School.
At age 25, my Dad’s hands had been blown all over Germany. When he arrived in Utah in ’45, Mom went to see him first, then I went several times in late ’45 or ’46 by train from San Leandro, crossing over the Martinez-Benicia Train Bridge. I was 2 or 3.
For years after returning home he kept his .45 service pistol in his top bureau drawer at home, the bullets in a separate magazine. He showed me how to use the .45 in an emergency; it had his discolored blood stains still on it, now turned brown, probably some mud stains too from the fields of Germany.
All Dad’s friends were blown-up vets from WWII, Korea, etc. I never cared much for the blatant stupidity and ravages of war. I worked for a couple years in the Viet Nam war industry right after college, paying my military debt to this country, I guess, validating my engineering expertise before I bailed to less-destructive endeavors. We get smarter than the enemy, he gets smarter than us, etc. — blatant military-industrial stupidity at its worst. A Dick Cheney mindset: too many youths running around with no direction, no discipline, no mentors, dropping out of high school, marking up public property with their semi-literate graffiti.
Peter Bray lives, works and writes in Benicia.
petrbray says
Thanks, Editor Marc: Always nice to see the COLOR version! It’s like wide-screen and stereo..can almost hear the P-38s landing and taking off!–pb
RKJ says
Good story Peter and glad to see your father survived and along with your mother appears to have raised a fine family
petrbray says
Many thanks, a man with no hands taught me how to use mine—pb