What Did You Do In The War, Daddy?

NPR's Karen Grigsby Bates conducted an interview with filmmaker Spike Lee, which aired on today's broadcast. Lee's movie, Miracle at St. Anna, is a tribute of sorts to the Buffalo Soldiers of World War II. Here, Grigsby Bates writes about her own experience with a World War II veteran -- her father:

My late father was a World War II vet, but like a lot of WW II vets, he didn't talk about it much.

Not that we didn't try to get him to.

"Daddy were you in the war?"
"Yup."

"Did you have a gun?"
"Yup"

"Did you kill anybody?"
"Hope not!"

And that was about the extent of it. He brought home a few sepia photographs taken somewhere in Southeastern France. One shows a bunch of uniformed black soldiers clustered in the doorway of a stone building, relaxed and smiling, arms draped over each other's shoulders. One of the men is cradling a bottle of wine given to them by one of the locals.

Daddy talked a little bit about how welcoming the French had been to the Colored guys from America (an experience black soldiers had with Italians in Spike Lee's new film, Miracle At St. Anna.) And sometimes my dad would talk about how important it was to be able to not only speak a foreign language but read and write it. (Apparently, they didn't discover a French speaker in his unit wasn't a French writer until they needed to read a message sent from a neighboring village...)

But details about the war, about his treatment in the war, were few and far between. My father and my father-in-law (who was assigned to the China-Burma-India theatre) served in the war because they saw it as part of their citizens' obligation. And they didn't, they wouldn't, talk about it very much. "War's over. Got enough other things to worry about."

Critics are debating how successful Spike Lee was in portraying the black soldier's experience in Miracle At St. Anna. But black veterans of a certain age will watch -- and in places wince -- and nod to themselves: the kid got it right.

And perhaps feeling it's been gotten right, those men, who are dying out every day, and taking their history with them, may decide to answer in more detail the next time one of their children, grandchildren or great-grands sidles up to their armchair and asks "what did you do in the war?"

-- Karen Grigsby Bates

Related: Spike Lee Talks 'Miracle' & Presidential Politics (Video)

Geoffrey Bennett

Tags: Miracle At St. Anna | Spike Lee

5:31 PM ET | 09-29-2008 | permalink

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