The Confession

When Father was in his eighty-sixth year, he suffered a near-fatal accident. The resultant attention he received would eventually lead to a striking revelation of the secret humanitarian work he had done in WWII.

The events that led to his confession began on a hot summer day, when the 85-year-old worked alone in his communal garden. Dad recounted that after a couple of hours under the sun he began to feel dizzy. He had forgotten to bring his medicine and water, so his blood pressure dropped and he began to over-heat. When he stood up from a crouch he felt faint, and that’s all he remembered. We know though, that he must have fallen, hitting the ground hard. His head narrowly missed the blade of the shovel, as the paramedics reported later. He was obviously unconscious before hitting the ground. It was early afternoon; no one else was fool enough to join him on such a hot day, so he lay there for hours.

He made a remarkable recovery in the hospital, after treatment for heat prostration and dehydration. In fact by the evening of the second day after the accident, he was back in the garden. The close call made me realize how much I cared for him, how much I still needed to know about him, and how little time we may have left. So I began several journeys to his retirement home over the following year to reconnect with him.

My idea was to capture (record) his WWII stories, and something about his childhood as well. And the bonus would be to learn more about Mom's early days; senility had now sealed her lips. The first trip revisited all of the exciting bomber exploits of Pilot Trimble, as he had recounted in days past. Finally, I was able to digitally record them, expecting some day to chronicle his career as a brave airman. Near the end of that visit, we began talking about his painful youth; how his father had left him, his mom and family for another woman. And how Dad (Robert) was left to struggle with school and now work, to support his mom, brothers and sister. It was on questioning him about this time of abandonment, that the conversation took a bizarre and shocking turn.
 
Dad said, "My idea of family ended when my father left us. I didn’t know how to handle my anger. In some ways going off to war helped me escape my unhappiness for awhile; I was so excited. But while I was in Europe something happened to me that changed how I looked at life. I have not talked about this very much. It was so terrible that I returned from Russia very depressed, not caring about my relationship with your mother, the military or even me."

Obviously the question of his father had awakened a world of pain. He seemed to be associating their relationship with the terrible memories of war. I decided not to push the discussion and concluded the visit. As I was leaving and while embracing Dad (the warmest I remember), one of the words in his heartfelt reflection suddenly jumped to the front of my mind.

"Russia?"

"What Lee?"

"Russia. You said you returned from Russia after the war. You never said anything about it in your stories, until just now."

"We’ll talk about it next time Lee. It’s one of the things I purposely never mentioned to any of you. In fact I was ordered not to. And frankly I am not sure I want to now. It was painful then and it’s taken a lifetime for me to recover. It was a dark evil time. No one knew that we were in Russia as OSS operatives." He stuffed money in my shirt pocket. "Here, drive safely."