27 March on the road
It's very strange, walking where my father walked 57 years ago. I'm in the town of Stolberg, Germany, in the western Ruhr valley...a town east of Aachen and the site of some of the heaviest American fighting in Germany during WWII.
My father had been a combat engineer then, part of the 104 th Infantry....the Timber Wolves, they called themselves. The phrase "no more than boys" aptly describes them...yet by November 1944, when he was here, my father and his comrades were already hardened combat veterans.
Yet they also were young. As I'm standing atop the castle of Stolberg, he relates the tale of "liberating" a vast treasure of cognac in a town near here...Eschweiler, he believes. "Cognac and choclate," he recalls and, when asked whether he remembers, he says, "I remember the hangover!"
So here's the scene: I've spent the day journeying here to somehow walk in his shoes, his footsteps. Somehow, it's all so different, of course, yet eerily familiar. So I am standing atop a hill just outside this 14th century castle, overlooking the old city...and I'm calling my father on myh cellphone. My mother picks up and screams her usual incredulity that it really is me, calling her, and from Europe! Why, it's like I'm just next door!
The geographic displacement of telephony.
She tells me to hang on while she grabs my dad, who's "just outside in the car." They both get on the phone. I say, "I'm standing atop the berg of Stolberg..." and immediately my father begins relating stories. It's remarkabl, really. He brightens up over the phone, telling me stories he's never told...and my mother even remakrs, "I wish the two of you could be there toghether." My military service has always been a strange bond between my father and me--we both hated the Army, yet it binds us in a way that my siblings can't share.
As I tell my father where I am and plan to go, he tells me stories of what he and his other 20-year-old fellow soldiers were doing...the time they went to Liege on a three-day pass from Stolberg and had to then hitch to Brussels, only to find that, since they didn't have a pass for Brussels, they couldn't get a hotel room. So, they went to the MP station, tryng to get arrested in order to have a warm place to stay. But the MPs would't comply...luckily, some Air Corps MPs were hanging around, overheard them, and said, "You guys can stay in our day room."
While I'm talking with my father and my mother, i'm wandering around the battlements and towers of the castle, then wandering the small, winding streets, ending up in the pedestrian zone, where the shops and cafes of Stolberg are.