The man in the photograph

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.”