The most dangerous person I’ve ever met? It’s my dad.
He looks harmless now, doesn’t he? In a wheelchair at my nephew’s wedding, he doesn’t seem like someone you should be worried about. But when I look at old photos, he doesn’t look dangerous either.
My dad was born in 1924, so he grew up during WWII. He, my uncles, and most of their friends served in the war. I thought it was normal that everyone’s dads had medals like the Purple Heart and Bronze Star. I also thought other people had dads who kept military weapons and ammo, including German stuff, at home. I never thought much about it because it was normal to me.
One of the things I remember the most is a story my dad once told about fighting in the war. He said once, while using the bathroom, bombs started dropping nearby. He had to dive into a foxhole with his pants still around his ankles to survive. Another time, he used a machine gun to take out a German vehicle from a very long distance. He was an incredible shot and had been awarded for it.
I never thought much about the number of people my dad might have killed during the war. I remember reading an article when I was a teenager about mass murderers like Richard Speck. The article focused on how many people they killed. I thought to myself, “Well, that’s not that many. My dad has probably killed over a dozen people.” I didn’t realize how strange that sounded until later.
It wasn’t until much later that I understood the full impact of what my dad had done. Most soldiers don’t actually kill in war. It’s usually a small number of soldiers who account for most of the kills. My dad was one of those soldiers. He did the killing while most others just supported and protected him.
Even my dad didn’t fully understand this until he went to a company reunion. He thought there would be about 100 men, but there were over 300. He realized most of them were there because they had been wounded early in the war and never returned to the front lines. That meant my dad and a few others were responsible for most of the casualties in his company.
Now, looking back, I realize that my dad was a true “badass” in his time. He wasn’t a murderer, but he did what he had to do during the war. And if you met him later in life, you’d never guess the kind of man he had been.
He lived a quiet life after the war, just a regular guy, and he “shuffled around town” until he passed away a few years ago. But I’ll always know what he did, and I’ll always respect him for it.