Missing The Boat: War Stories of Thomas Alan Dirkin

49 other reasons, but this was a genuine concern. To have seen the impact of war on families first hand in war zones must guide your decision making. The freedom to choose when to have a child seems very personal. That fight for freedom does not come without hesitance, obligation, and perceived responsibility. Guilt and Poppy Day Each year on November 11, my father would stand at attention, face east and observe two minutes of silence. This respectful observance was particularly poignant in my dad’s later years. I am left with the image of my father, approaching eighty, rounded shoulders trying their best to straighten, his posture backlit by the daylight through the front window of his house. His duty done, his eyes red, what had he chosen to remember? Were they different memories each year or the same? Were they few or many? In conjunction with the November 11 services he would often quote the following verse from Robert Laurence Binyon’s Poem “For the Fallen” published in The Times newspaper on the 21 st September 1914 They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old, Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn At the going down of the sun and in the morning, We shall remember them As he got older, he would lament on how perhaps it would have been better to have had your life cut short in the intensity of battle than to have lived to endure the ravages of age. The war, more than anything else was a defining experience in my father’s life. To have put all his chips on the table, gambled and won, over and over, has to put a person at the pinnacle of knowing he is alive. The experience was awful, with lasting scars, but the experience was unsurpassable for my father. I think my dad was fatalistic about how he managed to return home when many others did not, but there was always a level of survivor guilt below the surface. Simon Wiesenthal, Auschwitz survivor and famous post war Nazi