An Excerpt from my Novel

                            
Since my last post a dear friend and Icelandic military historian, Ragnar Ragnarsson, has passed away. His death reminded me how short life is and what is important. My main thrust now is to finish my novel, set in WWII Iceland. The idea for the novel came from photos I found after my father died. He was a Navy Photomate stationed in Iceland during WWII. I had always hoped Ragnar would give my novel its final edit. Somehow, I think he still will. Here is a chapter from the novel. 

                                 The Moment You See 

          Three days out of Newfoundland the gale hit. For three 

more, the Iceland bound convoy fought the North Atlantic's 
100-knot winds and monolithic swells. Sheathed in a ghostly shell 
of sea-ice, the cutters, destroyers, and transports struggled for 
ballast under their cadaverous weights. Weights that threatened to 
roll them over, taking all hands to the bottom of the sea.

        Aboard the repair ship Vigdis, the men were operating on

depleting reservoirs of adrenalin.  Until the storm ran its course 
there was little for Johnny, a junior officer and naval photographer, 
to do but wait. Wait, while the ship took her blows. Wait, while the 
crew chipped away at the ice with chisels and hammers. Wait, as the 
sea shellacked the weary men and ship with more rime and hoarfrost.

         Wait.

The squall’s unholy howls rang in his ears while the deafening laments of writhing steel echoed around him. Sounds so mournful, it seemed as though the ship itself was crying out in pain. Eating had lost its appeal, barely tolerable with the constant stench of dirty men and farm boys' stomachs hanging in the stale air. Sleep, once a welcome escape, eluded him.  

He wasn’t alone. A week of turbulent sea was exacting its toll on all the men. As the storm raged above them, a human maelstrom was gaining force below decks, kicked up by men forced into tight quarters for weeks. By fear, fatigue, and frustration. By the relentless waiting. 

          Restless, Johnny grabbed his camera. Behind the eye of his 4X5 Speed Graphic he felt a measure of control.  Winding through the ship, he zeroed in on the faces of country boys barely out of high school and wise guys from tough cities. 

          Focus. Snap. Repeat.
          He took shots of men playing cards and craps. Rereading letters from sweethearts. Men absorbed in the pages of their Armed Services paperback novels. Smoking cigarettes. Trying to sleep. All thinking the same things Johnny was thinking: Where am I going? Will I make it? How long before I can go home again?

         Home.

           For Johnny, home lay near the shores of Long Island Sound. A peaceful place awash in dappled slate-blue light. A place where life made sense to him. Where a dark-haired girl still loved him. Where it was almost time for supper. 

         Home.

In the row house on Madison Avenue in Port Chester, New York, Mama would be in the kitchen, clanging pots and banging drawers; making soup. Closing his eyes, he could almost smell the onions, garlic, and dill. See, under the strain of her furious chopping and stirring, Mama’s silver-streaked blonde hair slowly unravel from the knot atop her head. As a child he’d called the unruly mass that fell around her granite eyes, Mama’s soup hair. He'd teased her about it, telling her it stank of onions and garlic. In truth, it smelled of safety, comfort, and love.

           Home.

        Johnny longed to be in her kitchen now, drinking in the heady perfume of her Hungarian cooking. Expelling the retched odor of unclean and seasick men from his nostrils. Throwing his arms around Mama, pulling her close, and waiting for her to initiate the start of their favorite childhood game.

       "Mama! I’m home!”   
        She greeted him at the kitchen doorway. Bent down and hugged him tightly. 
        Suppressing a giggle, he scrunched up his face. "Oh, Mama, your hair smells so bad."
       “Bad?”
        Johnny nodded. 
       "Ah, but smelly hair mean good soup, Janos.” 
       "No, Mama. It's too stinky."                                                       
        Scowling, she returned to the stove and dipped a finger in the pot to taste her creation. Feigning grave disappointment, she slapped her forehead and rushed up to Johnny. Scooping him into her arms, she headed back to the stove. “How stupid I am. I forget secret ingredient.” 
        Wriggling free, Johnny scrambled from her and ran to his room, laughing the whole way. At his heels was Mama, yelling,  “Come back, secret ingredient! I need you!” 
        When Papa came home he would head to his reading chair in the living room. Spectacles low on the bridge of his nose, he’d soon be lost in the evening paper. It was Johnny’s job to pour him a small glass of Slivovitz before supper. He loved to watch Papa slip the cordial’s delicate rim under the canopy of his thick, grey mustache. Listen to him sigh, as the velvety plum brandy trickled down his throat. Then, smiling, he’d put down his paper as Johnny begged him for a story.                                                                       
        "So, my son. Which one will it be tonight?”         
        Papa knew. They both did. The only stories Johnny ever wanted to hear when he was a child were those of a young Wilhelm Loring, thundering across foreign fields astride a jet black mount. Tales of Papa, clad in a Prussian cavalry officer’s uniform, cutting down the French, the Russians. All who dared lay claim to his Teutonic homeland.
        They were exciting stories of honor and courage told to a child who didn't understand the complexities of warfare or its costs. Told long before Johnny learned Nazis and Prussians shared the same bloodline and borders. Long before Adolf Hitler made being German a dirty word. Before Johnny enlisted in the Navy and realized the enemy was a relative.

“Does it bother you, Papa?”

           “What, Jani?”

           “That I might be fighting . . .”

           "Prussians.
           "Yes.”
         Papa cleared his throat. “Hitler and his Nazis are not Prussians, son. I am proud you will be fighting them. Very proud.”
        That is the father he missed now. Not the dashing officer of his childhood fantasies but the steady, hardworking immigrant who chauffeured the people on the hill in their Packards and Hudsons. The man who had given up so much to come to America. Make a better life for his family. Papa, sitting in his comfortable chair, wearing his worn woolen sweater, reading. Always reading.
        "Remember, son, what you put in your head no one can take from you."

 Returning to his quarters, Johnny found the copy of Life magazine Papa had given him. The one with the photo of Goebbels, taken by Alfred Eisenstaedt. He flipped to the infamous shot of Hitler’s Propaganda Minister. Staring into the Nazi’s dark, brooding eyes, Johnny was filled with awe at the photographer’s mastery of his subject. In one split second, Eisenstaedt had captured on film the visceral hatred on Goebbels’s face as an aide whispered to him that the photographer was a Jew.

            "The photographer is also a Prussian, Jani. A Prussian you can be proud of.”

             Eisenstaedt’s gift for capturing his subjects at precisely the right moment reminded Johnny of something a photography instructor had once described as, “the moment you see.” Johnny believed he had learned that lesson. Knew when to turn his lens on the sea, ships, and men. Get the shot.  

 But it was a lesson he had yet to master when it came to the one subject he’d photographed more than any other. The subject that mattered most to him.

 Libby. 

Frank Buckles and The Brave Among Us

                                                     (Number One) 
     


    On February first, Frank Woodruff Buckles, of West Virginia, 
celebrated his 110th birthday. He wanted to live to age 115 and 
see a national monument to all WWI veterans put in place in 
Washington. Before that dream could be realized, Buckles 
passed away just after midnight on February 28. He was America's
last surviving veteran of World War I. 
     At 16, Buckles lied about his age, enlisted in the Army, and 
became a Doughboy. Serving in France, he drove ambulances loaded 
with the carnage of trench warfare. After the Armistice, he helped 
transport German prisoners of war safely back to their homes. 
     Twenty-five years later, in 1941, Buckles was working as a civilian 
aboard a ship in the waters near Manila when WWII broke out. The 
Japanese captured his ship and threw Buckles in a Japanese POW camp 
for the next three and a half years. 
     Buckles had fans from around the world. Each year he received bushels
of birthday cards from veterans and others who admired his lifelong 
work in helping us remember the sacrifices of WWI. A beautiful tribute to 
him can be found on his Web site: http://www.frankbuckles.org/.
     Retired, out of uniform, Buckles was only one of the brave among us.
With barely a whisper, many more slip back into society. Go on with their
lives. Unknowingly, I pass them on the street each day. In uniform, they 
grab my attention and admiration in airports, shopping malls, and at parades. 
Moved, I offer them my thanks.  
     But I know it isn't enough. 
     Most veterans say they don't want to talk about their war experiences. 
Yet I know those memories are ever present. As they were for the roofing 
contractor I employed one summer. 
     Over late afternoon beers, he opened up and told me about his first months 
home from Vietnam. For six months he couldn't sleep in a bed. The only place 
he felt safe was on the floor,  ear to the ground to listen for footsteps. Aside from 
that, he thought he was coping fairly well, until the day his mother asked him 
repeatedly to take out the trash. 
     Snapping, he screamed back, "Garbage? You  want me to take out the garbage 
when I was blowing people's heads off last week?" 
     Years ago, another veteran suddenly opened up to me at a dinner party. He'd 
been a Navy Seal in Vietnam. The experience that still haunted him, he said, was 
being dropped by helicopter into Cambodia on a covert mission with three other 
men. 
     "We disavow any knowledge of this operation. Be here in three days, in this 
exact location, or you are on your own," the helicopter pilot told the men. 
     In the kitchen, his wife turned to me, shaking her head. "He's never told that 
story before. Never." 
     Another story hits closer to home for me. 
     It's the story of a skinny kid from Port Chester, New York. He's the one on the 
left in the photo above. It was taken in 1942, in Iceland. The skinny kid weighed 
just 117 pounds when the photo was taken.  Shot nerves and exposure can do a 
number on your appetite, I've learned. 
     That skinny kid is my father, Navy Photomate Fred H. Melull. 
      Next week, Dad would have been 97. He died in 1999, without my ever 
completely understanding all the sacrifices he made while serving in Iceland and 
the North Atlantic during WWII. All I remember is that he was forever cold and 
liked to nap in a pool of sunlight on the radiant-heated floor of our family room. 
Downed in an aircraft in Iceland's interior, he suffered frostbite on his feet. 
     My brother tells me our mother routinely pulled shrapnel out of my father's 
back with a tweezers when it worked its way to the surface and snagged his 
t-shirt. That I don't remember. But I will never forget the story I overheard when 
a neighbor girl interviewed Dad for a school paper. 
     "Now, this is classified. You can't talk about this to anyone," he began. 
      Listening out of sight in the back hall, I heard my father tell the girl how he'd 
been at sea when his ship came across the wreckage of a troopship sunk by a 
Nazi U-boat. On board there had been women, soldiers, and not enough 
lifeboats to go around. Because of the desperate need for soldiers in Europe, the 
order was given to save the men over the women. By the time my father's ship 
arrived on the scene to help with the rescue few women were still alive. 
      "I don't know, now, if they were nurses, or WACS, or WAVES. I don't 
remember. But I could hear them out there, screaming. God, I'll never forget 
that. And those poor bastards who'd been told not to pick them up in their 
lifeboats. . . they were a mess. It's not the natural order of things, you know? 
Who let that happen? Who told those girls it was okay to be out there, to come 
to war?" 
     Choking back sobs, my father repeatedly told the girl, "Now you can't write 
about this. This is classified. It's classified."
     I've never been able to verify this story. All records of troopship crossings 
were purposely destroyed by the government after the war. Still, the veterans 
and researchers I've spoken to tell me to believe in my father's story, regardless 
of whether I ever find hard evidence of it. 
     I do.