MY FATHER'S WAR A Memoir-Novel
His Story
My father never talked about the war.
Not the way other fathers did — not the stories, not the medals, not the carefully curated moments of pride or horror that veterans sometimes offer their children as a way of explaining themselves. James "Brooklyn" Wheelen came home from five months of armored combat in the European Theater, sat down at the Thanksgiving table, and passed the potatoes. He watched his children. He meant every bit of it. And he kept what the war had made him in the place where he kept everything that had no resolution available.
I was twelve years old the last time I sat at that table and watched his face and did not yet have the language for what I was seeing.
My Father's War is the story of what was behind that look.
It follows PFC James Wheelen — tank driver, Company C, 23rd Tank Battalion, 12th Armored Division — from the rifle range at Fort Knox where the Army discovered he couldn't close one eye without closing both, through the North Atlantic crossing on a troopship hunting U-boats, into the frozen fields of Alsace on New Year's Eve 1944, through the grinding attrition of Rittershoffen and the house-by-house fighting at Aschaffenburg, and finally to the place the war had been building toward all along: a railroad siding outside Landsberg, Bavaria, April 28, 1945, where thirty-nine open freight cars told a story the war's official history could not contain.
The 12th Armored Division — the Hellcats — was one of the first American units to reach the Kaufering concentration camp complex. My father drove through it without stopping because the bridge over the Lech River needed to be taken and the war was still on its schedule. Then he turned the tank around and went back.
This is a book about what a man carries home from a war and what his silence costs the people who love him. It is also a book about two Thanksgiving tables twenty-three years apart — the one in 1943 where a thirty-two-year-old man from Brooklyn stored up his family against what was coming, and the one in 1966 where his twelve-year-old son watched him watch his own son prepare to leave for Vietnam, and understood, without having words for it yet, that his father was the only person at that table who knew what that meant.
My father died without telling me most of what he knew.
This book is my best answer to what he kept.