The young man gazing so steadily into the camera, the mere wisp
of a smile on his face, is my father, Clyde Gunnels, a farm boy from Eastland
County until he was swept up into the fiery furnace of World War II.
He would be about 26 in the photo, old for a soldier. Most
of his buddies were years younger. He wasn’t new to the Army when the photo was
taken, as shown by the corporal’s stripes he wears on his sleeve. There’s also
a quiet confidence radiating from his eyes. He has the look of someone who
knows his job, his place in the world. The look of a guy who already has
stormed a hostile beach and lived to tell the tale.
He’s seen terrible things, unimaginable things. And he will
see more, much more before the guns are silent and he is able to return to the
Texas countryside and marry his sweetheart, my mother, whose photo he carries
in a stained and battered case.
His age, as much as anything else, is probably responsible
for his stripes. He is not a talker, not a leader of men in the conventional
sense. There would be no showy heroics, no “follow me, boys” histrionics from
this noncom, who won his third stripe before war’s end. He would have led by
quiet example, by doing his job and going on to the next one without waiting
for praise or reward.
He was, after all, a farm boy, a youngster who picked cotton
to pay for his first gun, a .22-caliber single shot, only to have his gruff, domineering
father take it for his own. He was the oldest of three brothers, the one who
war took to the other side of the world, the one who crawled ashore four times
– in the Aleutians, at Kwajalein, at Leyte in the Philippines and, finally,
into the cauldron that was Okinawa.
Miraculously, he emerged unscathed, at least physically. All
his scars were on the inside, where he kept them safely hidden. My mother
worried about him, concerned at first when he refused to join the VFW or the
American Legion, dismissing them as refuges for blowhards and shirkers. That
was unfair, of course, but he had a lifelong aversion to talking about his
combat experiences. Only occasionally, when fueled by beer and shots of
whiskey, would he relate tales of noncombat hijinks during between-invasion rotations in
Hawaii.
My father returned from World War II, married, got a job
and raised a family. He did so with no fanfare. He expected no parades and
heart-pumping speeches, and he received none. He was a patriotic American who
flew the flag from our front porch on the Fourth of July and Memorial Day, but
acknowledged to me late one night that he hoped and prayed I would never have
to go to Vietnam. “I fought in war so you would never have to,” he said, tears
streaming down his cheeks. That I faced such a prospect seemed to him an act of
betrayal by the country he had defended so well.
Today, I honor the man in the photograph, a stalwart,
dues-paying member of the Greatest Generation who died in 1989 at age 71. I
honor my father and his comrades, the ordinary men who put down their tools and
their plows and their books to save the world from rampaging evil.
In speaking of these men, James Jones, author of From Here to Eternity and a WWII veteran
himself, wrote:
“How many times they had heard the old, long-drawn-out,
faint field command pass down the long length of vast parade grounds, fading,
as the guidons moved out front.
“So slowly it faded, leaving behind it a whole generation of
men who would walk into history looking backwards, with their backs to the sun,
peering forever over their shoulders behind them, at their own lengthening
shadows trailing across the earth. None of them would ever really get over it.”
