Writing Samples
“It’s just a field,” I said to myself. And that’s all it was: several dozen acres of open pasture land, home to three horses who were curious about this man with a camera who had stopped his red VW van on the side of the road to take their pictures as they grazed in their field.
Its western border was marked by a dirt road, twin tire tracks next to a row of trees and hedges. A hundred yards or so away, on the eastern side, was another, similar hedgerow. Off in the distance, about four-tenths of a mile away, I could see the fence and hedge along the northern boundary of the field. On the south side, a paved road, barely two lanes wide, led back about a mile to the tiny Normandy village of Ste.-Mère-Église.
But without even closing my eyes, I could see the P-47 fighters coming in to land, turning onto final approach half a mile to the south then skirting low over the road, a little kick of the rudder to compensate for a bit of cross-wind, then finally touching down on the temporary metal runway. Some of them would set down heavily, shot up and barely flying. Most would be okay. Some of them would not have come back at all.
One of those who came back every time he flew was a 24-year-old redhead from Gardena, California, Second Lt. Alton M. Perrin, my father and the reason I was standing by this field. “Be sure to go to Ste.-Mère-Église,” he had said to me just the week before, not knowing that it was already on my itinerary. I was going because it’s the town made famous in the movie The Longest Day as the site of a botched paratroop drop that left a soldier, played by Red Buttons, hanging from the roof of the church, his parachute snagged on a parapet. It also plays an important role in the more recent Band of Brothers TV series from Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks. But my father told me that he had been based out of Ste.-Mère-Église in the weeks after the D-Day invasion. Suddenly what had been a casual interest took on a much greater importance.
The P-47 Thunderbolt was the unglamorous workhorse of World War II. Not as flashy as the sexy P-51 Mustang, the “Jug” was actually bigger, could carry a larger payload, and could fly faster, higher, and almost twice as far as the Mustang. When it first came into service in 1943, it flew bomber escort missions, but by D-Day, it had been converted to primarily ground support duty.
When my dad arrived at Ste.-Mère-Église, he was fresh from flight school in Texas. Experienced aircrews were always reluctant to take a new pilot into their tents. The odds were long that the rookie would not survive his first five flights. Just getting to know some nice 21-year-old from Omaha—or 24-year-old from Gardena—could leave you depressed when he failed to return the next day.
But somehow, every time he flew out of this field, this simple horse pasture in Normandy, Lt. A.M. Perrin, US Army Air Corps, managed to make it back. For six weeks, starting a few days after D-Day, this was his home. Just six weeks living in tents. He recalls that there were tents to sleep in, latrines, a mess tent, the runway, the planes—and a baseball diamond; wherever there were American troops, there had to be a baseball diamond. From here he moved on to airstrips in Belgium, the Alsace, and Germany, primarily in support of Gen. Patton's Third Army. On VE day, he was flying out of a former German airfield in Bavaria. Ninety-nine times, he strapped himself into his plane. Ninety-nine times he headed out to drop his bombs, fire his machine guns, and, in turn, to be a target for German gunners.
After the war, he hung up his leather flying jacket and, with one exception, never sat behind the controls of an airplane again. Not because he didn’t like flying. It’s been obvious to me over the years that he loved the flying part of being a pilot.
It was the killing part that he didn’t care for.
My father taught me that not all wars are the same, not all battles not just. When Vietnam came along, and especially after the killings of John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, he left his job on the newspaper in Riverside, California, and joined the Peace Corps. It was time to put back some of what he had been forced to take from the world. He served as deputy country director in Afghanistan for two and a half years. One of his primary tasks was fending off stateside draft boards trying to yank Peace Corps volunteers out of Afghanistan and send them off to die in Vietnam.
But it was several years later, a day I’ll always remember, that he told me how proud he was of me for resisting the draft and opposing the war in Vietnam. This was my genuine, gold-plated war-hero father speaking, and he was telling me he was proud of me for being a draft dodger.
So here we are, sixty years after the end of my father’s war, thirty years after the end of my generation’s war, and hip deep in the war we have managed to fabricate for his grandchildren’s generation.
When I was a child growing up in Riverside, we used to do air raid drills—duck and cover—as if that would help us when the “Reds” dropped the big one on nearby March Air Force Base. We were told how those dastardly Communists were forcefully exporting their ideology, stuffing it down the throats of people who didn’t want it, how they thought they knew best.
Did those men die in Normandy, did my father fly out of that pasture and risk his life 99 times, so that George Bush could turn the United States into the country that today is the one that is force-feeding the world its ideology?
I weep for my native land. As I travel around Holland and Belgium and France, I remember the men who died, and I visit the cemeteries because I want those men to know that we remember—that I remember. But I feel like I need to apologize to them for what we have done with what they bought for us with their blood.
It is just a horse pasture in Normandy, but men like my father bought it with blood and with lives and with a sacrifice I cannot begin to imagine.
And we are squandering that heritage daily.
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Timothy Perrin is a California-born writer living in British Columbia, Canada. He moved there in 1974, near the end of the Vietnam War. His father, Al Perrin, was a newspaper editor in Southern California until retiring in 1990. He and Tim’s mother Patty now live in Cameron Park, California. They married two weeks after Japan’s surrender. They wonder if they are leaving their three great-granddaughters a better world than the one they inherited from their own great-grandparents.
Just a Field in Normandy
Posted on: The Coast Road Travel Blog
Oct. 26, 2005