All Roads Lead to Rome: Searching for the End of My Father's War - Hardcover

Thorness, Bill

 
9781640126275: All Roads Lead to Rome: Searching for the End of My Father's War
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1640126279 ISBN 13: 9781640126275
Verlag: Potomac Books Inc, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

Finalist for the 2025 Next Generation Indie Book Award
?Finalist for the National Indie Excellence Award

What happens when a seasoned journalist and travel writer takes on his most challenging assignment yet—crossing not just continents but also history—by retracing his father’s steps on the battlefields of Italy in World War II?

When a slim packet of his father’s letters came to light after his mother’s death, Bill Thorness began a quest to rediscover his father. Thorness traveled to the World War II battlefields where America’s first team of commandos fought. The youngest son of one of those commandos, Thorness gained a sense of the horror his father had kept from his family while standing on the mountain where the First Special Service Force fought. Then, standing on a bridge in Rome, he reflected on the loss his father must have felt in not making it to the end of the campaign to liberate the Eternal City.

In All Roads Lead to Rome Thorness considers his father’s decisive moments in battle and beyond, and how he soldiered on as a disabled veteran through his life, raising a family and succumbing to an early death. Alternating between reimagined battle scenes and present-day travels, Thorness explores World War II and family history, the value and limits of memory, the attitudes of war, and our society’s inadequate understanding and support of combat veterans, who may return with physical and emotional scars that change them deeply.

Thorness steps into his father’s shoes to revisit his story and finish that walk into Rome, weaving an account that is part travelogue, part history, and part memoir about the ravages of war.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Bill Thorness’s varied work as a journalist has spanned more than thirty-five years, from early work as editor of a national business magazine to current work as a freelance travel writer for the Seattle Times. He is the author of five nonfiction books, including Cycling the Pacific Coast: The Complete Guide from Canada to Mexico.
 

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Chapter 1

May 2009

I stood on the beachfront of my father’s last campaign, looking out at the
slate-gray sea where the commandos had come ashore. “He never got to
tell me about this place and what he went through,” I said to my wife, Susie.
“Didn’t make it long enough to be there when I was ready to hear about it.”

“He wouldn’t have talked about it anyway,” Susie said, “according to . . .
everybody.” Undeniably true. And yet, that was what I wanted. Maybe I
could have forced it from him, looked into his eyes and gotten through to
the soldier inside, and agonized with him over the indelible results of his
battles. Taken some of the pain away. But I would have to have been an adult
to do that, and I’d have needed to catch him on his own turf.

A grainy picture swam into view. My dad, Erick, leaning on a bar rail, two
fingers holding the neck of a beer bottle, not quite a smile on his face. The
photo had been taken at his main watering hole, in the one-street
town of Springbrook, North Dakota. That dusty country bar would be where he
might have given up a story, his tongue loosened by a drink. But as a child,
I wouldn’t have heard it, even though sometimes I was only fifty yards away.
On occasion, when a couple of us kids would hop into the back seat of the
car for a trip to town with him, the errand would end with the old Chevy
nosing into place in front of the tavern and him disappearing through the dark
doorway. If the stop went on very long, we might be visited by the bartender,
who’d step out to the car with bottles of pop and bags of chips. Forbidden
from leaving our seats, we would wait for Dad through the hot afternoon.

“Guess I’m just feeling sorry for myself,” I said. “And for him.” Susie and
I turned to walk up the boardwalk, stepping over a scree of gravel on the
crumbling sidewalk. She laid one hand lightly on my back. Could the clues
in this old war landscape redeem his memory and help me understand his
struggles?

There are moments when the lens spins into focus and unexamined connections
become exposed, a flash defining before and after. I had never much
studied war or imagined how battles half a world away would shape my life.
But illumination began to dawn in me, as real as the seasons, on the occasion
of a death. Standing on the beachfront on my first visit to Italy, my thoughts
went back to the family gathering that launched me on this quest.

Seldom had the table been so crowded as when the letters came out.
Unfolded from a slim box, the simple stack sat shorter than a coffee cup,
envelopes yellow against the expanse of polished wood. I exchanged glances
with my younger sister Karen, removed from knowing Dad by three additional
years, and then scanned the oval table that filled the dining room of my eldest
sister, Maggie. Most of my eight brothers and sisters, some spouses, and a
smattering of their many children looked on in anticipation.

With knotted fingers, Maggie pried out the first letter, an act that sent
a pang of grief through my mind. She, most of all of us, had inherited my
mother’s arthritic hands. On that day of the funeral of my mother, Shirley, in
late summer 2007, the letters Mom had kept near her Bible in her bedroom
were being uncovered, having been spared the dustbin but allowed to be
read only after her death.

My father’s words had not been heard in thirty-nine years. And I, only a
boy at the time of his death and now nearing fifty, could not recall the timbre
of his voice any more than I might the rare touch of his hand. The old farmer
loomed, but he was mute, stoic as his Norwegian forefathers. He was about
to become unquiet.

As Maggie prepared to read, I leaned over, and there, in orderly script with
sharp corners on every cursive word, were my father’s thoughts—sent to
his new love back home, who would become my mother—from a hospital
bed three states away. He had returned from fighting Hitler’s forces in Italy
with immobilizing battle wounds, and as he healed, he discovered her. His
treks home to the northern prairie broke up the surgeries and months of
convalescence, which also were referenced in his letters, but it was clear
that his anticipation of her spurred his recovery. He signed off with “All my
love, Erick.”

As the correspondence unfolded into the air, and the young lives of our
parents-to-be took shape in his words, Shirley and Erick became alive again
in the imagination of their youngest son, me. Was I holding my breath?
My mother’s death five days previous had settled a cloud over my mind,
which the words cut through. Air seeped back into my lungs, relaxing my
muscles. The dining room’s glow cast youth back onto the faces of my family
gathered two deep at the memory pool. I had not known the letters existed,
but my disbelief was edged out by awe at the treasure of ink on paper, folded
away for a lifetime.

And I began to consider the mystery of a man so important to my mother,
who was the most cherished person in my life up until the time of my own
marriage. Dad’s absence at my wedding was barely noted, he had been gone
so long, but the love and pride in my mother’s eyes had completed the
day for me. Shirley had lived four decades beyond him, but his memory
had lingered in her heart, and the letters were a part of him still there for
comfort. When they met, he was thirty-two, she was twenty-one, and it
may have been the first love of his life and of hers. I wondered if the travel
and the battles and the worldliness that came with wartime service made
him more open to love, more bold in it. He pined for her deeply as soon
as each furlough ended.

When I read your letters, it seems as though you are talking to me and I surely
wish it was so, as I can’t think of anything I would enjoy more.

His words on paper conjured his voice, echoing as rare pieces of instruction
but also as an overheard murmur of his nightmares or an angry shout at a
family dynamic fueled by his frustration at life and pain in his body, amplified
by alcohol. Looking back from adulthood, I recognized that throughout his
too-short existence, he battled physical and emotional demons, suffering that
may have soured his expectation of the future and twisted his enjoyment of
postwar family life into endurance. Perhaps he lived in withdrawal, choosing
to fight his battles alone and stoically shielding his family from the misery
he had endured on the battlefields of Italy. But the tenor of the letters did
not foreshadow those problems.

My siblings and I stayed up late with coffee and talk, grateful for this
glimpse of family history. The war still held power to affect us all, including
Susie and other family present, and it was clear that the letters would trigger
more exploration. As I finally set myself off to bed and drifted into sleep, my
mother’s absence softened slightly into images of a young couple planning
a postwar life.

Memories of the whole family together, though, remained grainy and distant.
A dust cloud blew through the sparse trees that barely had shielded our
clapboard farmhouse. I felt the need to make the landscape come back to life.
Erick’s writings brought hope that an image could again emerge with him in it,
as a husband, a father, a son, a decorated soldier, and a man who left the earth
with a devoted wife and nine children on...

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Verlag
Potomac Books Inc
Erscheinungsdatum
2024
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1640126279
ISBN 13 
9781640126275
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
255
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