On this day in 1944, my Dad was a 25 year-old first lieutenant in the 4th infantry, leading the men in a landing craft like this into really unknown waters.
He made it to the outskirts of Ste. Mere Eglise, where he was hit with grenade shrapnel. His left arm and hand were significantly damaged; shrapnel remained in his body for the rest of his too-short life, including in his eyes.
He’s always been my hero.
This poem is for him, William John Schulz, Jr.
Wounds and Scars
I have two noticeable scars
one on my forehead
from falling with a girl
on my back the other from
breaking a salt shaker in my hand
just before my first divorce
some wounds heal
from the inside out
raw and open for months
some wounds may never scar
Jesus had holy wounds
and Hemingway of course
Francis of Assisi had stigmata
as if Jesus was inside him
my father had shrapnel wounds
from a battle in France
I’d touch the scar on his chin
and he’d growl then laugh
over and over until
we both laughed and cried
“Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”
For some “faithful” – and for unbelievers too – “faith” seems to be a kind of drunkenness, an anesthetic, that keeps you from realizing and believing that anything can ever go wrong. Such faith can be immersed in a world of violence and make no objection: the violence is perfectly all right. It is quite normal – unless of course it happens to be exercised by negroes. Then it must be put down instantly by superior force. The drunkenness of this kind of faith – whether in a religious message or merely in a political ideology – enables us to go through life without seeing that our own violence is a disaster and that the overwhelming force by which we seek to assert ourselves and our own self-interest may be our ruin.
