This a memoir developed from a recent experience in 2014. It has a few premises, which are topics not dealt with here, but suffice to say they deal with fatherhood. Specifically, a missed fatherhood. I got the title by giving a nod to the title of famous story of Father Flannigan and his Boys Town. I changed it slightly to read: He Ain’t Heavy Brother, He’s my father.”
It came about in the same environmental time frames as my “Goodbye – Hello” memoir, and has three different episodes. This is just one. It is not a story about a lost love, but rather, about a never to be found love. Here’s how it all happened:
Before I attended my 2014 reunion of my WWII 13th Armored Division, I received an email from my reunion coordinator that she had been in touch with a son of one of our 13th Armored Division soldiers. His father was KIA on Friday April 13, 1945. He emailed her from nearby Fulton, NY, and asked if any of us might have known and/or remembered his father. He had, for years, been trying to find anybody who might have known him, as he was only three years old when he last saw his father.
Wouldn’t you know it? His father was in my Company, and was killed in one of the most horrific battles of those in which I was involved. It so happened that his father was in a different platoon than mine, and I did not know or remember him. But, I was the closest person to his father this man had ever been able to locate for almost 70 years.
I immediately phoned him and we began a most meaningful and connecting relationship. A relationship where he could actually be connected to someone who was with his father, and actually been with him up to, and when he was killed. His name was Ron Briggs and he lives with his wife Anita in Fulton, NY. He has two grown sons and grandchildren.
When I attended my divisional reunion of September 2014, I talked to my reunion coordinator and those veterans in attendance, about bringing back to Ron some recognition of our connection with those of our KIA brothers. Ron, due to health reasons, was unable to attend any of our reunions, so I felt a need to personally bring our togetherness (our deep affection for each other of our standing together when the need was apparent – a long winded term for being a buddy).
My reunion coordinator helped me and we created a document which expressed our comradeship with Ron’s father. When I got home from the reunion I took that document and met Ron and his wife at a restaurant about half way between Rochester and Fulton. I met with them and shared as much memory I could about how things were in our company. I have that information printed and detailed on an accompanying document. I did not go into detail about the battle except to confirm to him where his father was killed and an account of the occasion of his death that was recorded by another soldier in my company. My memories were mostly of confusion and complete horror. It was not something I wanted to remember and my brain, over the years, has mercifully erased most of its internal trauma connected with that event. I was there in that battle, however, and when I met with Ron and Anita, I got the feeling that the document I was able to give him was a part of some of the needed completions for him. There were more…
It seems that his notification by the government of the location of his father’s death was inaccurate. That information indicated that PFC Thomas Briggs was killed in a different place than Kemper. The conversations I had with Ron solidified the proper location of his father’s death as the hamlet of Kemper in the Rhineland. Kemper was located in the Ruhr Pocket campaign of April 1945, in which our division participated. As a result a new brass plaque was obtained with the corrected information and had been installed when I again visited Ron. This time at his home in Fulton.
I was able to go with him to the cemetery where his father was buried and be photographed with him and the newly corrected plaque. I was able to allow Ron to be photographed wearing my jacket with his father’s Purple Heart pinned above the right (when viewed by straight on) breast pocket. I, too, stood on the other side and was photographed wearing my jacket. My daughter photo shopped our two views to show us both in connection at Thomas’s gravesite.
Ron finally had a connection with someone who was a brother to his father.
The Battle Jacket, and the Salute Citation were physical symbols of that brotherhood connection.
In some sense, a reflection of his father…