Quite by accident, I was a silent witness the other day as a father went through a very difficult hour.  From across the street, against my will, I watched as he said good by to his son ho was leaving for military service.  Although I felt all the guilt of an intruder, I could not tear myself away from a scene that is being repeated thousand of times in every corner of our country, in every corner of the world.  The tall, well built, handsome young man stood a head taller than his dad.  In the way he held his shoulders, in the way he stood there, in the way he had his impatient hand on the car door, he conveyed the urge to go.  Whether this urge, this almost haste, to be off, was prompted by a sense of adventure or the practical approach of getting it over with or by the need to face as quickly as possible all the unknowns, I was left to guess as I stood on the other side of the street.

From that viewpoint, the viewpoint of the accidental observer and outsider, my heart went out to the father.  For there he stood, a small, almost sad figure, trying to learn in that one minute the terrible lesson that the one to whom he had given life would now leave.  I am sure that for many months as this hour approached, he had steeled himself, had clearly recognized the inevitability, and adjusted to the thought---yet who is ever ready for the moment when it actually happens?  Who is ever ready for the hour when the children say good by, particularly under these circumstances?

I could not hear what this father and son were saying to each other in this last, awkward minute or two, but it is not necessary to hear words.  There they stood, next to the curb, amide the unaware and indifferent flow of traffic and people, caught in the moment of bitter truth.  Suddenly, the young man opened the car door, turned once more to give his father an embarrassed half smile, turned the key, gunned the engine once and the pulled away.

His father, embodying at that moment all the lonely figures that have been left behind throughout man's paradoxical history, just stood there with his arms hanging limply.  He did not wave.  He did not smile.  He just stood there.  Finally, he turned but he did not go back into his office building in front of which this scene had been enacted.  No, he could not go in there now and face people, the telephone and the myriad trivialities of his job.  In half and hour maybe, but not just now.  He walked past the building, very slowly, got out a handkerchief, blew his nose. One can reach out to a man like that in such an hour with all the capacities of one's heart, one may try earnestly to walk in his shoes; one may even think that one understand - but ultimately that man is still alone.

The only one who can fully measure the weight of such an experience is he who also has said good-bye to his son.  Yet, with all the limitations of one who does not really know, I did try to feel myself into the father as he slowly, aimlessly, unseeingly walked up the street.  What were his thoughts, his feelings, his fears, and his gnawing questions?   Why did he momentarily withdraw from men and work and seek refuge within himself?   Was he sad and bitter"?  Was he proud and glad?  Was he valiantly trying to resign to the evidently historical necessity that each generation, over and over again, must give so many years of its young life to the life of its country?  Was he perhaps a little envious of youth, stirred once again by the ancient instinct of war and victory in battle?  As I said, I was only an outsider, an observer with a lively imagination.  It might have been all of  these things, woven together by memories, secret wishes and fears, and a subconscious search for answers to timeless questions.  It might have been the all-pervading dull ache a parent feels when a son must do all over again what was to have been settled once and for all more than twenty years ago.  It might have been a sharp resentment against the apparently unbroken cycle of history, which demands about every quarter of a century that fathers give up their sons.  It might have been the deep sense of failure and bitter disappointment and frustrating helplessness that only the last war was won but not the peace.  Reliving his own Second World War years, he might have remembered, with pride and a stir of excitement, when he and his fellow soldiers finally pushed the Germans out of Italy, out of North Africa, out of  France. And through those hard, dirty desperate war years, as with his heart in his mouth he jumped out of a plane, or slugged doggedly up a mined beach, or entered fearfully the possible trap of a silent forest, he was sustained by a picture and a vow.

When he was hungry and cold and wet; when he was so afraid that his brain and body  froze with near panic; when the years of  boredom and futility and loneliness dragged by with leaden feet, he clung to this picture and this vow.  The picture is of the young wife holding in her arms a baby boy.  The vow is the departing father's as his eyes once more, lingeringly, put a frame around these two people.  It is not a spoken promise, for the truly dramatic moments of our lives do not lend themselves to simple words.  Rather the promise lies in the fact of leaving and serving, in the ready willingness to do so for the sake of this son.  It lies in the trust that if I go now then you, my son, may not have to.  Yet, only 25 years later that son, now a man six feet tall, leaves to become a soldier.  And the father walks up the street.  Out of the tumult of his emotions and many thoughts there may raise the fervent wish that he might go instead.  The cold fact of knowing that he cannot and must not does not altogether subdue that wish.  Not only is it quite impossible for him to take the place of his son and so try to pay for the failures of his generation, his son and the world would not want it.

It is an ever lingering illusion in the minds of men, no matter how idealistic, self giving or brave they might be, that the war they fought and won is the absolute guarantee that their sons shall live in peace forever.  To make the world safe for democracy and to fight in a war to end all wars are mere shibboleths of their times to drive men to give their all, to give a valid reason for what they must do.  They cannot be ultimate solutions.  So I would urge this father, if I could, to forgive himself.  If  indeed there were failure and guilt they are not his alone to carry.  They are failures and guilts of the collective human nature and heart.  Bit by bit, laboriously, agonizingly, timelessly, man after man, generation after generation, must become better, must lighten this burden of failure and of  guilt. This father cannot take the place of his son.  He can only hope that through what he has instilled in this son, a fraction of an inch might be
gained in the eternal process of life.  And he is not alone, even though he may be taking this difficult walk alone, for not only are there now millions of fathers through out the world who ask the same questions and try to live without the answers, there have been endless processions of fathers through all history doing exactly the same thing.

You may ask now why it is that I have focused my attention and sympathies on the father?  What, you ask, about the mother, the wife, the lover?  Please understand that I am not unmindful of them.  How could I be?  But in song, story, poem and play, their plight of the waiting, the hoping, and the praying has been portrayed through all ages and in all languages.  With the risk involved of being overly dramatic already, I would not dare to reach into the hearts of these who are also left behind.  To these I can offer no more than my effort to live silently with them.  But the father is not often spoken of in songs and poems that sing and speak of what reaches into every family at least once or twice in its lifetime.  And the one father I can still see walking up the street alone, the one father who surely is all fathers.  As I said in the beginning, I was only an observer, standing respectfully at the outer periphery of what took place inside of that man.

I have no sons.  I can have no experience of this nature.  I can only be a fellow human being.  I cannot know whether all the thoughts I guessed at were really his.  Whether they were or not, I do know in that hour he was first of all a father who had said good bye to his son, and I do know that he blew his nose.  In our emphasis on tough, hard boiled, practical American masculineness, we have coined the phrase "a man does not cry"..but when he is a father like the one I saw the other day, why shouldn't he?

Submitted by:
    Jan Bartolina, sister of Capt. Ernest E. Bartolina, Jr.