Whitey

Any time the family gets together – the stories come out. I’m sure you know the drill. Family mythology gets more dramatic with each retelling. The winters get colder, the snow gets deeper, and bears grow to monstrous size and devour men whole.

We accept this because there is a curious pleasure in hearing a story that we remember from childhood. The stories that got a hold of you early, you remember. What’s more, hearing them again you can remember how it felt to hear the story the first time. Like you’re back there.

When everybody in the audience feels the same way, it’s like there’s an electrical charge in the air – everybody’s anticipating the next bit of the story. You smile even before the good part, you laugh even before the punch line.

My family’s mythology centers around two main themes: poverty and logging. My grandmother’s generation grew up during the depression. They and virtually everyone they grew up with were dirt poor. I’m guessing most families with four generations in America can easily come up with stories similar to the ones I grew up with. The depression got everyone, and while the stories are all different – the theme is the same. “We were poor,” your family tells you – and you believe them.

The second theme stemmed from the first – logging. My great-grandfather was a fairly poor businessman and had tried a number of things to bring in more money, one of which was logging. Like many people in those days, he died young. He left bills to pay and contracts for lumber to be filled – and suddenly, the family was in the logging business.

The logging stories I’ll save for another day – but suffice it to say, they too have a certain commonality to them. If you cut down trees, sooner or later – you or someone around you will be hit by one of them. Some are sad, some are funny, and a few are downright heartbreaking.

And then there’s my great-uncle B. He has his own mythology, and the only theme to it is: “Holy crap, this man shouldn’t be alive.”

My great uncle was in World War II, in Italy. You wouldn’t know this from talking to him – like most vets of the era, he doesn’t talk about the experience much. Like most vets, he’s just glad it’s over. Great uncle B has gone by a nickname for so long that my sister and I just assumed that was his real name. Nicknames stick sometimes, but B’s wartime nickname ended with the war. In the war he was known as Whitey.

In the war, Whitey drove a tank.

That alone would make him the coolest relative a kid is likely to know – but there’s so much more to it, and for years – decades, really – I’ve missed it.

Every reunion, the older generation gets together for story telling – and there are some doosies – but when uncle B gets up to speak, the room goes quiet and everyone just stares. I know this secondhand, because for five reunions in a row, I have managed to not be in the room when it happens. I’m off lost on the mountain, or in a boat, or golfing and I’ll get back and everyone will say “Wow, you should have been there! Uncle B told us about the time he drove a tank up and down the steps of the Vatican!”

-and I missed it! I mean, damn!

This year, I finally manage to find out about it, and catch the tail end of a just few of his stories. And it was good.

Like I said, uncle B was a tank driver – 19, skinny as a rail, and perfectly suited for crawling into the coffin-sized compartment where a tank keeps its controls.

It’s a good thing he was skinny – one of his more hair-raising stories involved a time when the tank was on fire and he went to scramble out of his hatch. He flipped open the hatch only to find that the tank’s turret had rotated so that the gun barrel was right over his hatch – partially blocking it. Instead of the incredibly tight opening he usually had to crawl through, he had half of it. As he puts it “The tank was on fire, so I got out of there anyway.”

Close shaves, he would say.

Like the time his tank had been knocked out by a bazooka and he and his crewmates scrambled out to run for it. They’re on one side of the tank; the Germans who just blasted their tank are on the other side, lobbing grenades.

The tank’s burning, there’s no cover other than the tank, and the newly-arrived grenades mean they have to run into the open ground.

Mind you, these are tankers, so they’re lucky if they have pistols on them. Outside of the tank, they’re pretty much civilians.

They run. Into the open. Uncle B describes doing a zig zag, which would be second nature if this was a war movie – but he’s telling you in a way that lets you know: no way this was a movie. He and the rest of the crew fully expected to die.

None of them got hit – and they never knew why. They made it to a ditch, and eventually got back to their unit to get a new tank.

After the war, uncle B was at some festival and he ran into a man he knew from the war – a fellow tanker – and they spent some time catching up. Eventually uncle B mentioned this story, and the other guy just nodded his head.

He was in a tank following uncle B’s tank. He saw it get hit, and then drove his tank into the line of fire to take out the bazooka team. He got them, too – or uncle B and his buddies would have been shot down as they ran.

Uncle B’s got a bunch of stories like this. One after another where he’s the one telling you the story – and while you’re listening, you’re thinking: God, I hope he makes it.

Bombs land next to his tank, so close that the tank slides into the crater. He is ordered to drive another crew’s tank down a narrow mountain road – and a “friendly” truck accidentally pushes him over the edge. The tank rolls down a mountainside and he climbs out looking like somebody poured blood over him. Turns out he’s uninjured; the blood belonged to a butchered sheep that was hanging in the tank.

And just one more and I promise I’ll stop:

He tells the story of a time when his unit was ordered to move across a bridge that was downrange of enemy artillery. The approach to the bridge was terribly exposed; the only thing above ground was a flimsy wire fence alongside the road leading up to the bridge.

B takes his tank down the road, and is hit in the treads right as he’s even with the fence. The tank crabs to the side and plows over the fence, before B straightens it out. At that moment, uncle B is picturing his damaged tank treads. The shear pins that hold it together. Break one, no problem, break a few and the strain of full throttle will tear the rest. The tread falls off, and the tank will be immobile.

Which means that he and his crew will be a sitting duck for the nice men who managed to hit him a second ago when he was moving.

So, he thinks: baby the tread? Or gun it? He pushes the levers forward, and waits for the tread to tear off. There’s a horrible sound of shearing metal, but he realizes that it is the sound of the fence being mowed down by his tank – his moving tank.

With that realization, he floors it and crosses the bridge, trailing wrecked fence behind him.

On the other side is a town, so he ducks into a side street for cover. He gets out to check the damage and just stares. Where the shell hit – there isn’t a single pin in the tread at all. It should have come apart on the bridge – would have come apart, except for one thing: the fence. The fence he’d plowed into had wound itself around the tread like a twist tie, and had kept the tread together.

If he hadn’t hit that fence, at just the right angle… that’d ‘ve been it.

Uncle B’s just the mildest guy you ever saw – but he reminds me of the all the guys you see in the documentaries. The ones who say – “after the war, everything after was just a gift.”

Uncle B’s just that kind of guy, too – loves life, lives well – and only when pressed does he blow your mind with some of the incredible crap he had to deal with.

Makes me want to go to the Vatican and look for tank tracks.