06/08/2025
I study the shimmers of light popping through the leafs of the Honey Locust tree that blocks my view. What is it about the past in our lives that seem to linger when we’re old? I just want to put to rest the stories I know. It is a tad cold as I look out on this August morning. I hear the throttle of the big diesel out on the road. The roar of the oceans constant in my ears, yet I can hear the swoosh of the cars in my distant past. Why do these memories resonate so? These are not the recollections of holidays now gone. No, these are the memories of who we are as a people. Cruel, I suppose.
I think of Sidoti. That’s his name. In the midst of the chaos of vicious war there in the Philippines long ago. He saw humanity for what is right. A Japanese soldier wounded, bleeding with his guts coming out. He pleaded, Sidoti did, for permission to go help the man in his dying moments. The Army officer, a doctor, knew there could be a gr***de as part of the enemies plan. Sidoti approached with caution and knowing he could die. He made the man comfortable and pushed in his guts, tending the wounds of the enemy soldier the best he could.
What came next in his words to his wife in 1945 stays with me today. He opened his bag, taking out a bottle of whiskey and a glass. Sidoti, a devout Catholic man, poured whiskey into the glass and put the glass into the dying man’s hand. As the American soldiers, his comrades in arms, who had moments before cheered his death of the Japanese man, Sidoti lit a cigarette and placed it between the lips of the man now with the glass. Sidoti closed his bag, backing away to the look of gratitude in the eyes and on the face of the Japanese soldier as he died.
Newspapers did not report the act. Sidoti did not get a medal for risking his life. Nobody thanked him for what he did, except for what was silently communicated in the eyes of an enemy—Sidoti must’ve seemed a saint to the man with his guts hanging out. I suspect his wife thought so too when she read his letter. Maybe this is why it lingers with me, staying inside the creases of my brain long after I read the dried ink on yellowed paper. A needle in a haystack of “Honey, I Love You and Hey, How Are the Cats?” love letters saved in a lamp.
Stick with me as I make this journey. The story of Sidoti goes to the character of my father—I don’t quite understand the leap—who witnessed his own scenery of evil in that war, and then stood on a freshly plowed winter wheat field where a familiar B-25 crashed into the ground. It was six years later and now in the homeland, the breadbasket of America while a man pleads for his life trapped under the fuselage of the burning plane. Still. Why do these memories linger with me? I have to tell the story. And the story is more than words.
—Beamish