Jerry Boykin & Lynn Vincent Read Online Free PDF Page A

big doe eyes, and mahogany skin. We had the run of the farm, which was a couple hundred acres. We loved to climb high in the oak trees or play hide and seek, darting in and out of the cool shade. But our most important job by far was building forts and defending them from the Indians. At least once a week, we expected a huge attack by the local Indians, and we spent a lot of time reinforcing our walls and ramparts. When foul weather kept us indoors, I was as happy as a duck in a puddle to hang around at Junior’s house with his mama and daddy, Miss Mildred and Mr. Sam. I don’t know exactly how many brothers and sisters Junior had, but when we gathered around Miss Mildred’s table for lunch, I was like a pinto dropped into a handful of coffee beans. I didn’t think anything of it. Junior and I were tighter than bark on a tree.
    The older I got, the more I found myself drawn to that old photo of Daddy and my uncles on the farmhouse mantel. My dad, Gerald Cecil Boykin, was what they used to call a “man’s man”—a hunter, a fisherman, a lover of all sports. The best thing about my dad was that while I was growing up, I knew every weekend he and I were going to go do something—hunt quail, fish for bass, or go watch a baseball game. I just knew that. It’s given me a heart for boys who grow up without a dad, as so many do today.
    But Daddy would never talk to me about what happened to him during the war. Men in those days held things in. One measure of a man was that he had the inner strength to bear his own burdens. But the more Dad clammed up, the more I clamored for information.
    To fill out the details, I began to imagine for myself a wartime back-story, in which my dad ran daring small-boat operations up the Rhine River with Glenn Ford, Henry Fonda, and John Wayne. I knew he didn’t, really, but I had fun thinking about it. On Saturdays, I handed over my fifteen cents at the picture show and another quarter for a box of popcorn and a Coke. Then I’d hunker in the flickering dark watching
The Guns of Navarone
or
The Great Escape
with Daddy or my friend Bobby.
    One television show,
Run Silent, Run Deep
, a show about submarines, also fired my imagination. The American Navy sank a German U-boat just about every week, and I added these scenes to my romantic ideas about war and fighting men.
    So what I knew about what really happened to my dad on D-Day, how he became a Purple Heart winner and my hero, I set against the backdrop of wartime newsreels and movie scenes.
    It was June 6, 1944. My dad was a radarman aboard a destroyer, and the ship had taken up its position off Omaha Beach at Normandy, France. From their inland artillery positions, the Nazis pounded the beach and surf. Dad, only eighteen years old, volunteered to drive a personnel landing craft vehicle, one of those defenseless small boats that carried heroes to death and victory. I was ten years old when Dad finally sketched the scene for me. I filled in the details, imagining he could feel the concussion of artillery blasts and hear the rattle of German guns from their beachside bunkers. I could see American soldiers streaming off other landing craft and onto the beach, some falling immediately, others charging up the sand, crouched low and firing. I knew from the movies that blood splashed the beach and bloomed in the water. And in the middle of it all, I could see my daddy, just a teenager, piloting his boat into the smoke and thunder.
    When Dad told me the story of how he was wounded, all he remembered is something exploded in his face and the world went dark. The Howitzers’ roar, the pounding shells, the bloody surf—all of it simply disappeared. The next time Daddy was fully aware, he was stretched out in a bed at Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington, D.C. A thick cotton pad covered his left eye, held there by a belt of gauze circling his head. The blast at Normandy destroyed his optic nerve and for the rest of his life, he would see out of