The Chaplain's Conflict: Good and Evil in a War Hospital, 1943-1945

Coda: “Home, Again”

Susan and I came home to Birmingham in the late summer of 2008. Two weeks later we drove down to Oak Hill. For some twenty years now my generation of the family has owned the house. It’s a special place with over 150years of family history just as complex as that of the county surrounding it. We could check up on some cousins and perhaps e ven introduce Pennie of Pennedepie to folks down at the store. It had been a year since I had heard that gentle backhanded humor at the cash register. “I have to say,Tennant, this has to be the first French talking dog ever to come to Wilcox County. Can she do any thing else?” And then I w ould head on up to the house and par k myself in the green rocker next to Ren’s and ponder the revisions I needed to make in his stor y. Well, if Pennie’s reception at the store went about the way I expected,the succeeding scene up at the house didn’t. Barely beyond the lingering effects of jet lag, I just sat there on the f ront porch, vaguely focused on how changes w rought by war stare you in the face, both in Europe and in Wilcox, and how the return stares vary so greatly.This, in turn, took me to what it was like for Ren to come home,where he was far removed from his other home—the 102nd.It was fittingly complex. On Tuesday, November 13,at 11:00 pm the 102nd Evacuation Hospital began unloading at S taten Island, New York. By 5:30 am the next morning they were asleep back in those familiar Camp Kilmer barracks, forty to a room. Six hours later Ren awoke. After a “good steak dinner” in the officers’ mess he telephoned Mar y, put his footlocker and bedroll on the Trailways to Selma, got a haircut, then spent the rest of the afternoon in the Officers’ Club, drinking beer and eating hot dogs and saying goodbye with Joe R utenberg and Clark Buckley. The conversation was not easy. After a night of “full sleep” in the barracks despite the drunken “noisy bastards” around him, he and Dan L aws ate a far ewell breakfast as Dan’s detachment-commander duties required his heading south after Coda “Home, Agai n” 112 coda Ren.That parting was even more difficult.For the next thirty-eight years, annual New Year’s Day telephone calls had the Brow and the Pulse still trying to figure out “how we got out of Brest alive” and which one of the physicians “really made the best bug juice.”By 4:00 pm Ren and ten others of the 102nd were on a train—the chaplain understatedly designated as “group leader”—for final processing at Fort McPherson in Atlanta. There, as he mustered out, he signed up for the US Army Reserve with a promotion to major, effective October 14, 194 6. At 9:30 am on Monday, November 19,1945,Southern Railway no. 37 pulled into Montgomery.Off stepped the khaki-clad minister: fresh haircut , Bronze Star, four battle stars for nor thern France, the Battle of the Bulge, the Rhineland, and central Germany. Sam’s widow, Dot, drove Mary and the girls to meet him. After lunch at The Elite they were back in Camden at 4:30 pm.That night after dinner at the house, where Aunt Joyce and Uncle Bill joined the family, an exhausted Ren managed a few minutes alone in his study. He gave the diary one conflicted distillation: “Home, again.”Then early bed. The author, his wife, Susan, and Pennie of Pennedepie at the Jones-McWilliams home in Oak Hill, Alabama. Note Ren’s rocker—a double seater—in foreground (November 2010).Photograph by Burk McWilliams. “home, ag a in” 113 In some ways it actually was “home, again.” Mrs. Tom Moore hosted the Kennedys at “a fine Thanksgiving turkey dinner” with fourteen other guests. The next afternoon old f riend Paul Starr came over to join Ren beside the radio for the Alabama –Mississippi State football game, in which Harry Gilmer’s leaping passes completed a per fect season and shortly sent the Cr imson Tide on to another Rose Bowl victor y over Southern Cal.Normalcy in full force.It continued...