August 15, 1:30 p.m.
Paul Dwyer: Yellow polo and red L.L. Bean fleece vest that his daughter picked out cover his gaunt frame, his shaking hands the spotted and bruised of the very old. He travels slowly, even just rolling the walker into the library takes an eon. Libraries don't look much different than they did in the 1930's back when he was in school, except for the computer monitors. I was online trying to figure out my class schedule when I noticed the old man. "B.G. 224" and a B-17 were on his baseball hat, and beneath the brim were a pair of prominent blue eyes. As he looked around the Patrick Henry Library, those eyes watered. "I wanted to see this place...before I passed away," he mumbled through his remaining teeth. The librarian continued giving the tour, timidly raising her voice when Dwyer kept saying "I'm pretty much deaf!" Curious as to why our tiny library deserved the last pilgrimage of a dying man, I asked him why he was here (rather loudly. The librarian was not happy with my tone, but I didn't care). Paul Dwyer is one of the last WWII veterans still coherent, and the first one I'd ever had the courage to talk with about America. Bloody Omaha, 9,000 dead on the beaches of Normandy. The doughboys who bore the brunt, Don Gionova standing on the flight deck, 21 years old and full of life, and then two hours later crashing into the North Sea, plane destroyed by flak. "We didn't have a body, we couldn't recover anything. We would go down to the Officer's Club and hoist a glass. That's all we could do." He marveled at the era of Strategic bombing, how the pilot's trained at 1,000 feet but then in actual combat bombed from 2,000; often destroying only the frames of the enemies' artillery and not the weapons themselves. How their radar systems still in the "initial" stages of technology were sketchy at best, treacherous at worst. How his desk in the Astro Dome got wiped out by a piece of flak when he miraculously wasn't at it. "The men you were with, 10 of us, we were family. If something happened to one of us, it happened to all of us." Several times he lowered his head and I thought he was coughing, sick. But he was weeping, weeping for an America that was worth fighting for, that our boys died defending. "You see the rapes and robberies that are happening in this country, not in Baghdad. These are problems that need solutions now. I've been looking for answers, I've been looking for answers my whole life, but I haven't found them yet." He flew in on D-Day - the weather was so bad they didn't drop a single bomb. He spoke of the Luftwaffe and countless names and dates. It was marvelous that an old man's memory could be so sharp, yet tragic that all he was dwelling on were the dead and gone. America has lost its hope for Paul Dwyer. He attended Harvard and Notre Dame studying economics on the G.I. Bill. He married his sweetheart and had 4 children, none of whom married. When his wife died of emphysema "Half of me died with her" and now he's just waiting. Korea, Vietnam, The Gulf and Iraq are merely "history repeating itself" in the same old cycle. He tried to move to Ocala, nice quiet Florida because it was the place to retire, but was drawn back to Virginia in the end, to D.C. and the shrinking circle of veterans he loves, his brothers.
I found out the reason Paul Dwyer was at the library is that he had donated books to us. He was looking for 8 volumes of Nubbin's biography of Lincoln. "There's no point in reading what people are writing nowandays about Lincoln when you've read these books," he confided to me. "They just keep cutting out excerpts of the great biographies and repackaging, reselling them to make a buck." He wheezed, he talked slow, he forgot names and he idolizes the America of the past, and he bears on his body the marks of a different era - a living piece of our past, my heritage: An American Hero.
