Q: Who is the most dangerous person you’ve ever met?
A: This guy:
The meme that says, “The old guy shuffling around town was once more badass than you’ll ever be,” really hits home for me. That’s my dad, sitting in a wheelchair at my nephew’s wedding.
He doesn’t look dangerous, does he?
Even in this old picture from 65 years ago, he doesn’t look that dangerous either:
I was born in 1954, so my dad, uncles, and most of their friends all served in WWII. I grew up thinking that all my friends’ dads had Purple Hearts, Bronze Stars, and military weapons like Lugers and SS memorabilia in their closets.
I thought everyone had stories about diving into foxholes with their pants down because a German 88 was firing while you were on the toilet. Or using a BAR (Browning Automatic Rifle) to take out a German half-track from 500 yards by shooting through a tiny slot in the front windshield. Maybe not that last one—my dad was an incredible shot and even got a “Regimental Marksman” award when he left the army.
But all that seemed normal to me.
It wasn’t until I was in my late teens that I realized maybe my dad wasn’t so “typical” after all. I was reading an article about mass murderers, like Richard Speck, who killed 8 nurses. As I read about the high body counts of these killers, I thought, “Well, that’s not so many. My dad’s killed at least a dozen people.” I knew that from the awards he had and from stories he’d told me. Later in life, I found out there were even more things he didn’t tell me when I was younger.
Of course, there’s a difference between killing in combat and killing people outside of war, but it still made me think. I realized that the number of people my dad killed wasn’t typical. The math didn’t add up—if two companies of 200 soldiers fought, only a few would end up killing the majority of the enemy. And my dad had killed at least a dozen by himself.
It wasn’t until later, when I read studies about combat infantry, that it started to make sense. In most units, only 10-20% of the soldiers actually kill the enemy, while the rest are there for support. My dad was one of those rare soldiers who did the actual killing.
He figured this out years later when he went to a reunion for his old company. Instead of the 100 men he expected, there were over 300. It turned out most of the soldiers who’d been wounded early and sent home without returning to combat, never really saw action. My dad and a few others had done most of the fighting and killing.
So, yes, my dad was a badass. He wasn’t a murderer, but he was a killer, just like some other soldiers from WWII and Vietnam. And if you met him later in life, you’d never guess it.
Even though he shuffled around town in his wheelchair for the last few years of his life, he was once a very dangerous man.
