WAR LETTERS: The Bruce France Story

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This is an introduction to the father that I thought I knew and the father I have come to know. My siblings and I had known very little of his military experiences until after he passed away. We are still in awe of what we have learned since his death.

I had always known he served in both WWII and the Korean War. He could ramble on about anything but he Never talked about the wars. As I begin to research his combat history, it is not possible to comprehend his everyday life during wartime…and as I researched deeper into his history, I kept finding myself in websites about “Task Force Smith.” So…I read about Task Force Smith – just because that’s what was on the page. It was a wretched story. I called my mother and asked her if she had ever heard of Task Force Smith and that I wondered if dad might have been part of that unit. She started crying and said……. "he was….…he was."

As brutal as you will find his combat history, he had also worked with the USO shows and he writes about the Rockettes painting his toenails when he's sleeping. He washed Dixie Dunbar’s hair and gets pretty good at braiding Joannie Jackson’s. He writes of Bob Hope running around in red pajamas.

His letters range from the innocence of a 17-year-old boy writing home from boot camp about how “swell” things are in the Army to the smell of burning and rotting bodies in Taejon.

It is within these letters that I have come to realize why my dad was the way he was.

It is within these letters that we all may begin to understand the struggle these men (boys) had not only to survive, but coming home and coming to terms with what they had seen, what they had experienced.... and what they had done during combat.
For many, like my father ~ this battle endured a lifetime.

My True Relationship with dad began when he died

...when my mother gave me the box of letters he had written to his folks during the wars. There were hundreds of them, all carefully folded in their corresponding envelopes.

I sat down in a chair in my living room with the box of letters in my lap. Two weeks before we had all been in the hospital with dad when they discontinued his life support. As much as I thought I had numbed myself to this man, I was not prepared for the pain I felt when he died.

My mother had always been aware of the issues we had with dad. In the hospital on the night he would die, she put on her coat & gloves, brushed several days’ frozen snow off her car and drove home by herself. She wanted us to have one-on-one time with dad to finally be able to say what we wanted to say.

My adult mind got sucked back into my child life when he died. All the things that I thought I had overcome were painfully real again. Why did he declare Ground Hog's Day to be his favorite day of the year when I, his first born, was born the day before? He rarely remembered my birthday yet he always remembered Ground Hog’s Day. Why did he like everyone else’s children and not us? They adored him. Why did he have to ‘up” everything I did with something far greater? Why Couldn't he have seen me? Why did he make up stories that weren’t true? I truly could not recall one conversation I ever had with the man that I believed to be true. He saved the day or he told somebody off, or he proved how great he was – everyday! And I….I was marked as somewhere between worthless and good-for-nothing. Why wasn’t there even one scrap of something real in him he could have given to me?

I had spent years reading, understanding, learning and healing from the dysfunction within our family. I thought I was numb to him. As a child, I learned to tune him out. He was what he was. Yet, why was this pain so deep within me? Deep and painful. I was supposed to be the wise one among my siblings. I finally thought I could say out loud how much I truly disliked the man. Several of my siblings were appalled and could not understand my pain and my anger.

I carefully pulled a random letter from an envelope and began to read....

Dad was in a foxhole somewhere in Korea that I'd never heard of and it was far below zero and he was so cold. There were flashes of light from the action taking place in the distance and the night sky was heavy with smoke. They have been firing the howitzers, (whatever they were) over his head from somewhere behind him. Bedcheck Charlie, (whatever that was) had made an appearance at some point and there was a big hole in front of his foxhole. He had killed hundreds of Chinks or Gooks and hoped to kill more the next day. They had no food for that day and he hoped to kill a chicken the next day and cook it. He was getting ready to bundle down for the night while things were quiet. His spirits were good. And then there was the part that he wanted to come home. He had questions about the farm and the tobacco crop and the hope of coming home soon.

It was surreal. I felt like I was there

It was like being at the movie theatre and the movie is so compelling, that when it's over you have to readjust your mind - but you're not ready yet. But this wasn't a movie. There was something unbelievably strange about folding the letter up again and putting it carefully in the confines of an envelope. How could something so...so...so....there are NO words - get tucked back into an envelope. AN ENVELOPE. And then it really hit me - as horrifying as it was - It was MY father. MY FATHER.

I began to open more letters, carefully removing them. He wrote of the bodies burning in Taijan, orphaned children in the streets, dead everywhere, killing and more killing, trains blowing up, the severe cold, extreme heat, the smell of the dead. He defined the smell of war by the individual components that become mixed together to create it.

I keep questioning why I am so compelled and find it so necessary to tell his story. I think it is beyond important and I think it might be what I was supposed to do in my life. Maybe it's healing. Maybe it's a way to find forgiveness. I know it is critical to share these letters about these men who came home and assumed the role of fathers after they had experienced the horrors of war. Maybe it's a way to help other children of soldiers who had childhoods and fathers like mine. Maybe it's a way to reveal that there are reasons that soldier fathers have common characteristics due to combat. Lots of maybes. Whatever the reasons, there are many answers that will come from his letters.

I know they have brought me to finally be able to say, “I love you dad.”

Barbe (France) McKittrick

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