Note to the reader: Thank you for joining me on my journey to share my father's journey! New posts to the blog here appear at the top of the main page, pushing the previous posts down below. Please be sure to check out the earlier posts and work your way up to the top. 

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Introduction

My father, James V. Gasbarro, was a soldier in the US Army from February 1943 until November 1945. He served as a member of Headquarters Battery, 129th Anti-Aircraft Artillery Gun Battalion (Mobile), in the European Theater of Operations and, though usually well behind the lines, saw action in England, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Germany. After the war he returned to his hometown, married, and raised a family.

Dad began attending his military unit’s annual reunions probably some time during the 1980s. I honestly don’t remember. He attended them religiously through at least the mid 1990s, a couple years after Mom passed. As advanced age began taking his comrades’ mobility and lives, the reunions ceased.

One evening I engaged him in talk about his time in the war, but, as his usual, he didn’t really want to talk about the war, but rather about the memories he preferred to share, the funny moments that happened, even in light of terrifying events that occurred around him. Then he shared a story from one of the reunions: “One of the guys there,” I use quotation marks, but only as I remember the conversation, “he got up in front of everyone and said, ‘I have a confession to make. I did something all those years ago that they told us never to do. I kept a diary of every place we went and the things we did. I’m old, now. I suppose if the government finds out and wants to put me away, they won’t have me for very long.’ And then he handed a copy to everyone who was there.” I wish I had asked Dad the man’s name, but that is lost to time.

Dad gave me his copy, typed out by his old Army buddy as transcribed from his handwritten notes, and told me it was mine to keep. It fastened in my mind for the first time — though Dad had probably told me a dozen times before — that his unit was the 129th Anti-Aircraft Artillery Gun Battalion (Mobile). And it instilled within me a desire to someday retrace his footsteps across western Europe. I had hoped to bring Dad with me on such a journey, however, “time is a cruel thief to rob us of our former selves” and, now that I am able to make the trip, Dad is long gone.

Now, in the 100th year since Dad's birth, I'm about to embark on this dream journey and I intend to share the journal here with any who wishes to read it. The first several entries from the original diary tell of the unit’s stateside activities, and will come in successive days as my departure approaches, to coincide my landing in Europe with the telling of theirs.

 

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