Missing The Boat: War Stories of Thomas Alan Dirkin

11 What a waste! When I was about 11 years old, my dad had recently bought a reel-to-reel tape recorder. It was big, maybe 18X18X9 inches. We could play music on this machine and record. One bright morning in the front room of our house in Marple, Cheshire, I was starting to play with the tape recorder and rewound the spools. When I pressed play, my dad’s voice sounded out. I had never heard my dad speak with such anguish, pain, anger and intensity. He was using the tape recorder to perhaps speak about what happened to him in the war. Perhaps this was a planned catharsis. Or, perhaps the beginning of a memoir. He described his first day in action, in mid-May 1940. He was with the new friends he had made during training at Aldershot. After six-nine months training for this day of action, the anticipation and waiting was over. For my dad and his friends it was time to look death in the face; a strong catalyst for brotherhood, no doubt. The subject of fiction and film - but it was real today. Leading the enlisted men was a career soldier. A sergeant who had melded the corps during training. He was a man who my dad had learned to respect and a leader the men would rely upon to meet their objectives, including staying alive, on that day when things got real. My father and his fellow soldiers were making every attempt to focus on the job at hand in the deafening noise of battle. Twenty yards into World War II my dad was blown off his feet by an exploding mortar round. His sergeant had suffered a direct hit. Seconds before, he was a living, moving silhouette of a soldier in the haze of battle. Now he was gone. Completely gone. Vaporized. “What a waste!!” my dad’s voice on that tape recorder was saying; the pain pouring out and unlocked, perhaps for the first time. “What a waste!!”