'Best forgotten'?

My father's ankle-length, black-and-white tweed Mayfield, the first fine piece of clothing he bought for himself when he returned from the war, hangs still in my crowded closet. Once a year I slip it from the hanger and try it on, always astonished that I cannot squeeze into the giant's coat.

I picture him draped in it, towering over me as we stand beside his robin's-egg-blue 1948 Plymouth coupe, his eyes twinkling, his mouth curled in the confident smile of a man who knows he helped save the world.

But behind his eyes something dark lurked.

Even as a child, I could sense it, a bone-deep sadness -- or was it some horror? -- that I could not name. I ached to know his demon, but I could not form the question. Instead, I would ask about the scar I could touch, a railroad track of puckered pink that bloomed at the center of his right forearm and ran to his shoulder.

"Why don't you tell him about it, Al?" my mother would say.

"Evelyn," he'd say, "some things are best forgotten."

Albert R. DeSilva never was much of a talker. Few of them were, those legions who left our shores as boys and returned as men.

Through the GI Bill, they flooded the colleges. They fathered children in record numbers, then built thousands of schools for them. I was in the first class to graduate from our new high school, Dad a member of the board that approved its construction.

From the ash heap of war and economic depression, my father's generation built the middle-class life most Americans today take for granted.

What they did not do was build a monument to themselves. That was left largely for their sons and daughters, who dedicated it in the nations capital on this Memorial Day weekend after more than three-quarters of the 16 million who served in World War II -- including my father -- were gone.

I doubt it was something Dad wanted; I can't imagine he would have gone to see it. A monument is about remembering; and some things are best forgotten.

'That's not how it was'

One night, when I was 12, Dad brought a friend home for dinner. After eating, I sat with the men, hypnotized as the friend spun war stories. They were what I had longed to hear from Dad -- tales of glory, of "killing Krauts." Dad struggled to change the subject, but on the guy went, punctuating the air with his hearty laugh.

"It's getting late," Dad finally said, although it wasn't; and he hustled the blowhard out the door. Then he wheeled on me, angry, the demon restless behind his eyes.

"That's not how it was," he said. "Anyone who talks like that wasn't there."

It was around then that Dad's Army dress greens vanished from his closet. But I had gazed at the uniform often enough to memorize the round patch on the right shoulder -- the head of a howling wolf on a field of dark green.

It was the insignia of the Timberwolves, the 104th Infantry Division, composed of conscripts drawn from the length and breadth of the nation in the bleak year of 1942.

America was building a vast army virtually from scratch, gathering coal miners from Pennsylvania, auto workers from Detroit, farm boys from Georgia .... and Al DeSilva, a young butcher from Taunton, Mass.

They had grown up poor, most of them. Who hadn't, during the Great Depression? Many had never been more than 50 miles from their homes until a fearful nation drafted them, packed them into troop ships and flung them to the farthest reaches of the globe.

Dad was 22 when he entered the service on Dec. 2, 1942. At Fort Sheridan, Ill., he was trained on the BAR, the Browning Automatic Rifle, capable of firing .30-caliber slugs at up to 650 rounds a minute. The weapon was 47.8 inches long, Pvt. DeSilva 66 inches tall.

Dad was assigned to the 104th, awaiting deployment at Camp Carson, Colo. On June 6, 1944, when radios crackled with the news of D-Day, word came that they would be shipped to Europe by the end of the month.

Dad pleaded for a 10-day furlough, caught a train home and proposed to the woman he would stay married to for 54 years. In the wedding photo, the bride, sheathed in a gown of ivory satin, stands beside the soldier who must soon leave her. He is picture-book handsome in his summer dress uniform, a wolf howling from the shoulder.

Commanded by flamboyant Maj. Gen. Terry de la Mesa Allen, the 18,000 men of the 104th landed in France on Sept. 7, 1944. On Oct. 23, they were blooded, the first of an extraordinary 195 consecutive days of combat.

The 104th helped drive the enemy from Holland, then went deep into Germany. Pvt. DeSilva didn't make it that far. He was one of the division's battle casualties -- 5,305 wounded, 1,294 dead.

Dad was evacuated to a hospital in Paris; for a while, it appeared he might lose his right arm. Back in America he spent nearly a year recovering in a Boston hospital.

His arm was totally disabled, his war record said. But by the time I was 10, Dad drove 10-penny nails flush with two swings of a hammer as he transformed our little house into nine rooms and a garage. Afterward, he'd sit motionless, popping aspirin and cradling an icepack in the crook of his arm.

Daring the demon

I never stopped trying to fill the hole in Dad's story. It became a ritual for us. Once each year, I'd ask him to tell me what happened in Holland. He'd grimace and shake his head no.

In November of 1997, my three grown children and I sat down with my parents to share what we sensed might be my father's last Thanksgiving. During the meal, my youngest son, Jeremy, dared the demon: "Grandpa, tell us how you got wounded." My father froze, a forkful of mashed potatoes halfway between mouth and plate. I held my breath.

Then Dad began to speak.

An early morning rain fell as the company of 180 men crossed a turnip field and waded into a canal, weapons raised above their heads. There were no Germans for miles, they'd been told. They had been cleared out by other elements of the 104th.

But as they emerged from the water, a superior force, dug in and waiting, opened up with rifles, mortars and light machine guns.

Dad flopped on his belly and fired bursts as men around him began to fall. Did he hit anything? There was no way of knowing. But the Germans were close, less than 100 yards away, and he was good with the BAR.

Soon the order came to retreat across the canal. Dad was up to his waist in water when a mortar round exploded nearby. Shrapnel tore through his right arm. The BAR slipped from his grasp.

His right arm dangling, he reached the bank, crawled out and collapsed. Other soldiers, some dragging wounded, drew back 50 yards from the canal, dug in and returned fire.

Dad lay on his back on open ground between the lines as tracer bullets streaked by in both directions. Twice more he was hit, shrapnel tearing into both arms, both legs, his right hand and both sides of his chest.

For 13 hours he lay there, his blood leaking into the Dutch soil. It was 10 p.m. before medics could reach him, Dad said.

With that, he stopped talking.

A confession

My children and I stayed silent, sensing there was something more. When he spoke again, it sounded as if memory had thickened his tongue.

"I shot one of our own men," he said.

It happened in the confusion of the initial exchange, when Dad opened up with his BAR.

"Oh, Al!" my mother said. "You can't know that for sure."

"He was right in my line of fire, Evelyn," he said. And there was a big hole in his back.

Never before had I seen my father look ashamed. The emotion was palpable, like a stifling cloak.

My oldest son, Richard, was the first to speak: "Are you kidding me? You're a hero!" But the hero, stunned by his own history, silently refused the honor.

I couldn't fathom my father's courage in choosing to shoulder such a burden alone. On his face, I glimpsed the demon that had also ripped at the souls of millions of other men who were asked, a lifetime ago, to save the world -- and did.

On March 15, 1998, the day after his 76th birthday, Dad's heart finally quit. At the funeral, I rose and looked out over the faces of family and friends, one of them an old man who carried shrapnel in his body from Anzio.

"I miss Dad," I said. "I think we all will, the next time the world needs saving." Some things are best not forgotten.