A Heroic, Tragic Father Haunts Memories

In the yellowed pages of a scrapbook is a Tampa Times article announcing my father's graduation as a lieutenant from flight school at Drew Field. Remnants of the old airbase are still visible in what we call Drew Park, next to Tampa International Airport.

He was handsome and dashing in uniform, his hat at a rakish angle. Soon after that photo was taken, he met my mother at a USO dance. Two weeks later, they married. One week later, he was shipped to a P-51 squadron in the Italian theater.

As the air battle over Italy ramped up, he got his first kill: a Messerschmitt-109. His next was a Junkers-88 medium bomber. He was promoted to captain, and that, too, was in the Times. By then, reporters had begun calling the fighter pilots "buzz-boys" after the tactic of strafing - "buzzing" - the enemy on the ground.

The now-brittle clipping shows a young man standing next to his P-51, "Darlin' Presh" - his nickname for my mother - nicely painted on the fuselage. He had been informed Mom was pregnant, and letters from him in the scrapbook make clear how happy he was, as well as how much he disliked war but was determined to do his best for America and freedom.

Then one day he took off on patrol. He and his wingman were jumped by a pair of ME-109s. He got on the tail of his opponent, pumping 50-caliber bullets into the German fighter. It exploded in front of him.

It was his third kill, but disaster struck: The exploding plane sent shrapnel flying, shattering his canopy, damaging a wing, and flinging a tiny sliver of metal into his left eye. Unable to fly, in terrible pain, his plane damaged; he bailed out behind German lines.

My mother received the dreaded "yellow telegram," notifying her my father was missing in action. Two weeks later, I was born. When the nurse laid me in Mom's arms, she dubbed me her "little Buzz Boy." I've had the nickname ever since.

A month later, Italian resistance fighters smuggled my father back to American territory. He was sent to a base hospital in the Panama Canal Zone, but the eye was badly infected and could not be saved. Only copious amounts of the wonder drug penicillin saved his life.

He loved flying more than anything, but nobody wanted a pilot with a glass eye. Mom told me later that his personality changed.

Jobs were scarce, so he took work as bricklayer. He learned how to do it with one good eye, learned how to drive again, and became adept at many tasks that usually need two eyes. But he was not a happy man. He became harshly stern.

My sister was born a year later, and she was golden to him, but I was a spindly, asthmatic kid, a disappointment. Beatings followed. At night, in bed, I would hear loud cursing, slaps of hand on flesh, and Mom crying.

He parlayed his skill with bricks into a construction startup, and did well for a few years, but the company failed. He planted 20 acres of orange grove, but the trees died.

The physical and emotional abuse continued until I was 12, and Mom divorced him. My father fled to Washington, D.C., - the only place in America you could escape paying child support - went to work as an airline agent and remarried. The marriage failed. He married again, started a travel agency. Both it and that marriage failed.

Finally he got work as a clerk in a Miami court. He lived alone in a modest apartment, estranged from everyone he'd ever known and loved.

He died there, age 58, of diverticulitis. It was two weeks before anyone knew, when the odor seeped through into the hallway. His funeral was unattended.

I think of him on Father's Day. I also think of 30,000 maimed soldiers coming back from Iraq. The thousands with post-traumatic stress disorder. The hundreds who attempt suicide. The VA's lack of acknowledgment and treatment. President Bush vetoing an expanded veteran's benefits bill.

And I wonder how, if such a bill had been in place in 1945, my father's life - and mine - might have been different.