Crazy Uncle Mike

Heroes, POWs, Mafiosos, and Hillbillies (Part 2)

Grandpa K

In case you missed Part 1

My paternal grandfather was a very typical staunch Irish Catholic man. He was so dedicated to the idea that one summer some neighbors decided to do something nice for him. He had these clam back metal chairs that he loved to sit in that had been rusting out. So they stripped them down to the metal and then repainted the chairs, orange. Orange is the color that represents Irish Protestants, and Protestants and Catholics in Ireland had been killing each other for a long-time in Ireland. The Protestants representing England who the Irish have historically hated due to their occupation of Ireland. Once those chairs were painted orange my grandfather never sat in them again. Not even after our neighbors re stripped them and painted them green. He was a hard man, a steam pipe fitter in New York City, also the son of an Irish Immigrant.

The government missed him the first go round in the draft for WW2. So in early 1944, when the US was ramping up for D-Day they came back around and drafted my grandfather. He objected due to having four small children at home, but having missed him once, they weren’t letting him go. So he ended up in basic training, then right to ranger school and then to England in the run up to D-day. His first landing was on Omaha beach on D-day. If you’ve seen Saving Private Ryan, that was him, jumping over the side of the amphibious craft so he didn’t get gunned down in the boat, cutting off his pack so he didn’t drown. Swimming to shore, staggering up the beach, crawling passed and over dead GIs. Somehow luckily avoiding being gunned down by Nazi machine guns that were cutting men to pieces on the beach. His job, climb the cliffs, lob grenades into the Nazi concrete bunkers. He lived through all of that as they took the beach, the cliffs and all of the Nazi defenses on Normandy beach.

My other grandfather was there as well, the same beach, but he was on the ships with the tanks waiting for the all clear. When that all clear finally came, Grandpa K was directing traffic at the first intersection off of the beach. My other grandfather would have ridden through the same intersection on a tank. It’s really possible that my two grandfathers passed within a few feet of each other that day in Normandy. Years before our two families would cross paths.

Grandpa K was pushing into France with his unit for the next two weeks. Caught in an ambush one afternoon my grandfather got blown up by a German grenade. When he regained consciousness he was being loaded onto a train to a German POW camp. The German sergeant guarding the Americans told my grandfather that he was a nurse before the war and that if the metal didn’t come out of my grandfather’s knee, first he’d lose the leg, then he’d likely die. But he could help, my grandfather reluctantly agreed and the German pulled out a pocket knife and proceeded to remove the shrapnel, likely saving my grandpa’s life.

My grandfather spent several months in the prison camp and with some other POWs planned an escape. He told me the story when I was around nineteen and explained that his job was to strangle a guard during the escape. It was a surreal experience to have your grandfather detail his murder of another human with his bare hands. The escape was initially successful and when it was, the Nazi’s reported my grandfather and the others dead to the Red Cross. So my family was told he was dead, but he wasn’t. He nearly made it out of Germany before being recaptured. He told me that the Nazi’s had a very specific way that they handled escapes. They’d hold each guy who escaped until they caught the next, then they would execute the previous one, so that in the end there would only be a single survivor, this time my grandfather. They then shipped him back to the camp, it would be a couple day trip and the first night they put my grandfather in a concentration camp. This was late in the war, the most horrible time for Jews who were still alive in the camps. Essentially people who looked like living skeletons. They put my grandpa into the barracks, and the Jews started to give my grandpa their blankets and food they had squirreled away. The only time I ever saw him cry was when he told me this story. He tried to refuse but they forced him, they told him he had to eat, they were already dead, but he would live.

When they got near the camp they tied him up in the back of the dump truck and loaded the truck with the dead bodies of the other escapees. They drove him into the middle of camp where a post stood alone. They dumped him and the dead on the ground and then he was tied to the post and left tied to the post for a week. This was how the Germans dissuaded escape attempts. Not much later the allies came through and liberated the camp, but my family still thought he was dead and his return to the states was faster than the paperwork.

Knock, knock, knock, hi honey, I’m home. My grandpa basically returned from the dead as far as my family was concerned. But he’d been gone awhile and my grandmother had fallen for another GI who had returned from the war. She promised to end it, but a couple of weeks later my grandfather saw them kissing. He beat her all the way back to their sixth floor apartment in Yonkers. He was hanging her out the window threatening to toss her down all six floors when an Irish cop came in. Honestly, only an Irish cop would have been able to talk him down at that moment. He pulled her back in and told her to leave and never come back. And when a steam pipe fitting, PTSD afflicted, angry Irishman who was just hanging you out a sixth story window tells you to do something, you do it.

I never met my grandmother, the story I was told my whole life was my grandmother was an evil woman who went grocery shopping and never came home. My father, the baby of the family, probably believed that as a child, but my aunt the oldest and a nun, absolutely knew better but let the story stand. My grandmother came to NY to visit in the 80s and my dad didn’t see her, nor did he tell us she was visiting. The ironic part is about fifteen years ago as Facebook was getting really popular, my sister and first cousin got a DM on Facebook. Are you related to Billy and Tommy which is their father and uncle, “Hi, I’m your Uncle Leo was the reply.” My grandmother had two sons after leaving my grandfather and sadly the other had died six months earlier. Leo came to visit, now I look just like my father. And while I wasn’t there to meet my new found uncle (I frequently get new siblings as well, a story for another day), I was sent a picture of my father and my new Uncle Leo. The fact is, if you put me between them, you’d be hard pressed to pick which was my uncle and which was my father. Guess my grandmother had the strong genes in the family.

So I get my madness legitimately from my family, and that will become even more apparent as I delve into more of my family’s history/mythology. When I was still drinking I used to play a game in bars. I’d bet someone a beer my family was more fucked up then their family. We trade stories until someone surrendered and bought the other a beer. I’d never lost that game. I’d met a woman and asked her out, we were planning on going out Saturday night. We happened to bump into each other at the brewpub on Wednesday night. We got talking, conversation looped around to families and by habit I threw down the gauntlet, story for story for a beer. The first thing she said was, “two beers.” I should have known right there, but I was cocky and agreed. I told a story, she smiled and went into her story, before she was through I’d bought the two beers and cancelled our date.