"Hut – two – three – four.  Hut – two – three – four.”  The cadence of my childhood.  Echoing footsteps on the wooden floors.  Memories of a spindly, pale child with purplish under eye circles marching behind her athletic paratrooper dad.  Up and down the narrow Philadelphia rowhouse steps, past the shoe-box sized bedrooms, the stark no-sink bathroom, and the musty coal bin, the seven year old girl’s mission was to not give up – just like Dad. 

In 1953, my father, Arthur “Dutch” Schultz, was in his late twenties and had the physique of the welterweight boxer and baseball player he once was. Tall, with mercurial blue-green eyes and light brown hair, Dad had a rakish smile that charmed every woman he met.  I didn’t know at the time, but he had been the boxing champion of his 82nd  Airborne regiment, and a combat survivor of the European Campaign in World War II, including a bloody and confused D-Day and nightmarish Battle of the Bulge.  To me, he was just Daddy – and my hero. In  appearance we were a study in contrasts – the All- American young man with his little Italian waif of a daughter.  I inherited my mother’s Mediterranean looks, but in temperament and interests I was just like Dad.

Our marching game was all I knew of my father’s war during my early years. Because Dad was silent about his war experiences, only later did I realize that his war wasn’t all fun and games.  The traumas that he experienced during his war years would haunt him for decades. During his life, he has been a fighter of two wars.  When the young paratrooper descended from a flak-ridden plane into the dark Normandy sky on June 6, 1944, little did he realize that his survival of D-Day was only the beginning.  Battling Hitler and the German Army would be finite.  Not so the struggle for his psyche.

The World War II exploits of Dutch Schultz have been documented and are part of our nation’s history.  Dad’s stories have struck a responsive chord – he has been cast as “everyman” and symbolic of the citizen soldier.  Cornelius Ryan’s 1959 book, The Longest Day, depicted Dad as an eager, confused, and sometimes lost paratrooper dropped behind enemy lines on D-Day.  In the 1962 movie version, he was portrayed by a hyperactive Richard Beymer of “West Side Story” fame.  The movie program for “The Longest Day” called the character of Dutch Schultz the symbol of “all the men in the ranks who participated in the June 6, 1944 invasion”.  Ryan further followed Dad’s march through Europe by including him in the 1966 chronicle of the final days in Germany, The Last Battle, and the saga of Market Garden in the 1974 book, A Bridge Too Far.

Decades passed with little recognition for the veterans of “The Good War”.  However, as they aged, nostalgia took hold, spurring increased interest in World War II victories. Noted historian Stephen Ambrose’s book, D-Day – June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II was published on the 50th anniversary of the attack. Dutch Schultz was again a prominent figure in the recounting of that fateful day.  In Ambrose’s subsequent books, Citizen Soldiers(1997) and The Victors (1998), Dad’s compelling oral history sparked the author’s continued interest and my father was again included.   Ambrose and Dutch eventually became pen pals and the writer, in his letters, prodded the elderly trooper to write his life story because it demonstrated a journey that was both difficult and “inspiring” (Ambrose letter, 00/00)..

  

Television, with its visual impact presented an ailing Dutch Schultz as one of a select group of World War II veterans who are featured in documentaries on D Day anniversaries.  The old paratrooper with the craggy, lined face, expressive body language, and oxygen tubing in his nose is still a compelling symbol.

             

All the glory focused on Dutch Schultz and his fellow World War II veterans in their waning years can be counterposed to the invisibility of the traumatized combat vet in immediate postwar America.  The popular view as typified by Tom Brokaw’s Greatest Generation series of books is that of easy readjustment, happy families and achievement of the American Dream.

A superficial glance at my family in the early 1950’s would fit that stereotype.  My parents were an attractive and outgoing couple with two cute little girls. But my family history is indicative of the dirty little secret of The Greatest Generation combat veterans.  Dad’s attempt to regain normalcy after the war was a struggle – one that affected his entire family.  Our story is one of family tragedies including alcoholism, divorce and young death, but also one of triumph and courage by the survivors.

My family’s travails were not the norm in the optimistic fifties.  Then again, neither was my father’s war experience.  In World War II, only 25 percent of the army was assigned to ground combat divisions.  In those divisions, only about half the soldiers actually were in battle and exposed to life threatening situations. (McManus, p.3).  In the other services, only Marines were consistently involved in combat situations.

Most American servicemen who returned to our shores in 1945 had not felt the fear and terror of loss of their lives, had not seen or caused death and destruction, had not lived exposed to the extremes of weather, constant enemy shelling and seeing the torn and bloody bodies of their buddies.  The unscarred noncombatant is the mythic World War II vet – who came back home, married his sweetheart, used the GI Bill to gain an education, the VA mortgage to buy the suburban home and to rebuild America to be a superpower. These were the intact families of my childhood – the father was giving his children the American dream he had dreamt about during his war years. These are the veterans that are lauded as having shaped the twentieth century.  For Brokaw’s Greatest Generation, the war of their youth forged their strengths and was for many the defining point of their lives.  As Michael Takiff noted in Brave Men, Gentle Heroes, America feels good about World War II.  “We celebrate it accurately as a majestic national achievement.” The returning servicemen who vanquished the evils visited upon the world by Germany and Japan “came home heroes” and built successful lives as “husbands and fathers”. (pp. 4-5)

Not so my paratrooper Dad. He has been recognized as a hero but he never identified as one.  He tried hard to let go of the traumas but continued to fight a war within himself for years.  He left the killing fields of Europe, but Normandy, Holland and the Ardennes never completely left him.

When I was a little girl, Dad hid the memories except in the still of the night. He would relive the horror of the war in his nightmares. Bolting from a sweat soaked bed, he would start to fire his imaginary machine gun, while alerting his buddies of the enemy presence. As my startled mother attempted to soothe him, he would gradually calm. Daytime hours found him more in the present, but the constant repressing of his psychological wounds took its toll and our intact family of four was joined by an uninvited guest – alcohol.  My mother, daughter of Italian immigrants, was ill equipped to deal with her traumatized husband, who while drinking a quart of beer each night, still managed to function well in his work as an Army counterintelligence agent.  The marriage lasted for 12 years, but there was always the undercurrent of tension like the steady hum of a power line.  I was 11 when they divorced and my father, my pal, was gone from the home.

This small piece tells Dutch Schultz’s story by recounting not only his war battles but his life battles and how the father daughter bond survived through it all.