Boats and memories - Nov 09 Short Shots

Walking on the beach, a string of boats reminds a man of how he met his recently-lost love

         Brett Slocumb looked out to sea. It was a quiet mid-morning, and Brett was walking on the beach where they were having this year’s family reunion. The waters of Harrington Bay were nearly calm, with only the gentle lapping of water ripples coming across his bare feet. So beautiful, he thought to himself, so calm, so peaceful. So much what I need right now. Ah, Renée, how I wish you could see this with me. You would love it here. Unbidden, memories of his wife’s soft French accent bloomed in Brett’s mind. A voice he’d heard for the last time nine months ago, the night she had said, “Au revoir, mon amour,” in her intensive care room before passing away.

         Damn that bastard to hell, Brett thought. “The bastard” in this case was Andrew Stone, a 39-year-old construction worker who had drunk too many tequilas at the bar one night before driving home. Seeing his Ford Expedition weaving down the road, a police officer had tried to pull him over. Stone had instead panicked and floored the accelerator; the man already had two convictions for DUI. In the attempt to avoid his “third strike,” he raced through a red light at 80 miles per hour – hitting the driver’s door of Renée Slocumb’s Toyota Corolla. Between the size difference of the two vehicles and Stone’s excessive speed, the safety features of Renée’s Toyota had been rendered ineffective. Renée’s injuries were so severe that doctors were only able to postpone her death for a few hours, giving her a chance to say goodbye to her husband of 60-plus years.

         Sixty-four years, Brett thought to himself. Sixty-four years, three children, eight grandchildren and two great-grandchildren we had together. We traveled the country, went on cruises, learned to ski in our fifties, and had a great life together. All brought to an end one night by some stupid drunk driver. May he rot in his prison cell. Scant weeks after the wreck, Andrew Stone had been convicted of vehicular manslaughter and sentenced to 28 years in prison, with parole eligibility in 19 years. The judge, bringing up Stone’s previous DUI arrests and his blood alcohol level of .38 (over four times the legal limit) the night of the crash, had rebuffed defense pleas for clemency. Brett Slocumb had felt pity for Stone’s family when the sentence was read, knowing they were losing a husband and father. That had not, however extended to Andrew Stone. You at least have a chance of getting your loved ones back, Brett thought to himself in the courtroom. I’ll never see my Renée in this life again. Slocumb and his adult family had watched Stone be taken away by the guards, then left without talking to Stone’s wife and children. The last that Slocumb had heard, Stone was serving his sentence at the state prison in Limon.

         The memories had come to Brett from an unlikely source – a series of small boats sitting in the water just off the beach. Though not nearly as many or as big, the line of boats reminded Slocumb of how he had first come to visit France, wading ashore in the first wave at Omaha Beach on D-Day as part of the “Big Red One,” the 1st Infantry Division. Pinned down under enemy fire, he had looked back numerous times to see assorted landing craft lined up in ways similar to the small rowboats he saw here on the beach at Harrington Bay. Though it had been the start of an arduous campaign, fraught with fear and death, 22-year-old Staff Sergeant Brett Slocumb, USA, a native of Grand Junction, Colorado, had gone in determined to come out alive. He had already survived the Torch landings in North Africa and the Sicilian campaign, and was determined not to die in France.

         He came home after the war with a battlefield commission, several medals, and a new love. While on a recon patrol, Slocumb’s platoon had been ambushed by a unit of German infantry. Slocumb and his men had fought their way out, holing up on a French farmstead to tend to their wounded and await reinforcements. It was there he met Renée Morel, a 24-year-old farmer’s daughter and member of the Maquis, the French Resistance. She and her family (all resistance fighters in one form or another) had taken the Americans in and hidden them from German soldiers looking for the ambushed platoon. There they had stayed for four days, until the platoon’s parent company arrived to assist and relieve them. During those four days, Brett and Renée had fallen in love.

         Moving out with the company to its next objective, Brett had made the ultimate promise – to come back for the Frenchwoman when he could. Both knew that the vagaries of war would make that almost impossible, yet they each held on to the promise. From then until the German surrender, Renée Morel listened to the radio intently for news of the war, trying to figure out where her American amour might be, and praying he was still alive.

         Her prayers were answered in August of 1945, when Brett Slocumb (now a first lieutenant) visited her home while on leave. His unit was part of the Occupation Forces in Germany, and he had arranged leave to go back and learn if Renée had survived the war. They kept in touch with each other for the next two years, finally marrying (with Army permission) in September of 1947. Their first years of marriage were spent separated, as the Army would not allow Brett to bring his bride to Germany with him.

         The couple came to the States in late 1949, after Slocumb’s commission was transferred to the Reserves. Brett brought his war bride to his birthplace, Grand Junction, CO, where they made their home. There they raised Collette, Mark and Raymond while Brett worked on the local fire department and as a reserve sheriff’s deputy. While adapting to the local customs and becoming quite Yankee Doodle in most matters, Renée had never forgotten her roots or heritage. A trace of her accent always remained, giving her voice a special quality that thrilled Brett to no end. Even now, nine months after her passing, the memory of that voice brought a special joy to his heart.

         “Grandpa Brett, is something wrong?”

         “No, Tommy… well…”

         “Are you thinking of Grandma Renée again?” 16-year-old Thomas Slocumb, Raymond’s youngest son, had seen the tears in his grandfather’s eyes. The youngest of the grandchildren, he was also the most inquisitive and empathetic.

         “In a way, Tommy, I was. Seeing those boats over there… tell you what, let’s go sit down on that rock, and I’ll try to explain.” The two made their way over to a large boulder sitting on the beach. Wear marks were easily visible, showing where others had sat before. The two of them settled in, Tommy expecting a long story of some sort. Whenever Grandpa Brett said he would “try to explain” something, it usually meant a long story. Tommy didn’t mind, for grandpa’s stories were often exciting and adventurous and gave an eye on history he didn’t hear about in school. “You’re probably wondering why a line of small boats on a beach would remind me of your grandmother.”

         “Is this the time you and she went fishing and she almost fell in the lake?”

         “No, no,” Brett chuckled. “That was on your father’s pontoon boat at Grand Lake of the Cherokees. Oh, did your grandmother not like it when I told that story. Man she would give me what-for afterwards. No, this is actually about how I came to first meet your grandma in France.”

         “Ooo-kay,” the youngster replied. This was not going where he expected it to. So he kept quiet.

         “When I first met your grandma, it was 1944, and I was 22 years old. August of 1944, to be exact. I had been in France for a little over two months, fighting in the Big Red One in World War Two. But how I got to France… that’s what them boats out there reminded me of.”

         “Huh?”

         “Tommy, take a look at the way those boats out there are lined up. Now, imagine those boats are five times the size you see there, and five to 10 times as many boats.” The young man followed his grandfather’s sweeping arm during the description. “Picture that, Tommy, and you have the view I saw of the invasion of Normandy from my position on Omaha Beach. I ran off one of those landing boats, along with thousands of dogface grunts. It was an awesome sight, and a fearful time.”

         “Fearful?”

         “Oh, yes, Tommy. It was one of the scariest times of my life. It wasn’t like the invasion of North Africa during Operation Torch; that was a mild cakewalk compared to Normandy. There was little resistance in North Africa. At Normandy, the Germans threw everything they had at us. Mortars, howitzers, machine guns, flamethrowers, land mines on the beach, strafing runs by fighters, you name it and they tried it.”

         “Why?”

         “You see, Tommy… Germany had invaded and occupied France and a lot of other countries by that point. The German government, which was largely Adolph Hitler, didn’t want to give up that territory. We were coming in to get the German soldiers out of France as a first step to stopping Hitler and eventually ending the war. This wasn’t a fight like you and your brother throwing punches, mind you. It was combat to the death. Allied soldiers, including those from America, Britain, Canada, and Free French forces came into Normandy to fight and eventually defeat Nazi Germany. The Germans, especially the Nazi government, weren’t going to give up without a fight. And boy, did they give us one over the next year. The Allies had won in North Africa by that point, and were making progress in Italy. But the invasion of France was the big blow against Hitler, the big sign that the world was coming to get him once and for all. Plus, he had declared that the ‘Atlantic Wall,’ all the bunkers and pillboxes he had built on the beaches of France and Belgium and Holland, could not be breached. When the Allies landed at Normandy and weren’t driven into the sea, it was a huge wound to both Hitler’s ego and his propaganda. Losing there was tantamount to losing everything for him.

         “For a while, the Allies were trapped in our landing area at Normandy. But eventually we broke out and started moving towards Germany. About two months after the landing, my platoon was out on a reconnaissance patrol –”

         “Reconnaissance?”

         “I’m sorry, Tommy. We were going out to try to find where the enemy was. We had gone a ways out ahead of the rest of our company when the enemy found us.” Shuddering in the memory, Brett Slocumb took a moment to compose himself. “A unit of German soldiers ambushed us. We were able to fight our way out, but we were cut off from our company. We ended up holing up on a farmstead; luckily, the family there was part of the Maquis, the French Resistance against the Germans. It was on that farm, waiting for our company to come get us, that I met a very lovely young lady.”

         “Grandma Renée.” Tommy had heard that part of the story from his grandma several times over the years.

         “That’s right, Tommy. Your Grandma Renée.” Suddenly, Tommy gave his grandfather a tight hug. As he returned the favor, Brett Slocumb felt another set of arms wrap around him. The same feminine yet strong arms that had held him close on a French farmstead in 1944.



Word count: 1963