So there really are ghosts, spirits of the dead I mean, that haunt the living, forcing us to live with an unbearable memory, or reminding us that our lives once intersected with those of others, some of whom won’t be left entirely behind. I never understood the nature of ghosts, nor was I even convinced of their existence, until I heard the story, long after my father’s death, of the ghost that haunted him as he lay dying in a hospital bed in suburban New York.
     One morning his younger brother came to visit and was surprised to find Dad agitated and confused. “What’s wrong?” asked my uncle.
     “He was just standing there,” said Dad, “at the foot of the bed, in his uniform. The German. He was just standing there looking at me. He was right there, in his uniform. He was there until you walked in, Willy, staring at me.”
    It took my uncle a little while to calm Dad down and get him to tell the whole story. The young German my father saw that morning was a soldier he had killed in 1944. Dad was a first sergeant with the Ninth U.S. Infantry Division and fought in the invasions of North Africa, Sicily and Normandy. In addition to a Bronze Star with two oak leaf clusters and a Purple Heart, he earned eight battle stars. His unit, the 47th Regiment, landed at Utah Beach on June 10, four days after D-Day. He apparently ran into this particular German shortly thereafter.
     “He wasn’t clear about exactly where it happened, might have been Normandy, Belgium or Germany,” my uncle recalled. “They were under some heavy shelling and your father jumped into a bomb crater to take cover, only to find this German already there. Just the two of them were there, face to face, without any time to think. The German cracked John in the face with the butt of his rifle and knocked him on his back. But your father jumped up and grabbed the German by the throat with both hands. The German, he said, did the same to him, so there they were, with their hands wrapped around each other’s throats, trying to strangle each other.”
   My uncle was several years younger than my father. He had joined the Navy late in the war and never saw combat, having served on a tanker in the Pacific. Like a lot of vets with his kind of experience, my father seldom talked about the war, and when he did it was usually some harmless story about his buddies, or maybe a vague description of a battle he’d seen, but there was never much detail about all the fighting and killing in which he’d been involved. In the 40 years since Dad had come home from nearly three years overseas, his brother had never heard the story of this young German’s death.
    “You know your father had those big hands and, jeez, he was strong. But he was scared, Timmy, I could see the fear in his face when he talked about it. He was sweating there in the hospital bed, and shaking, looking off into nothing, not at me, like he could see that German’s face. He broke the guy’s neck, he said, he could feel it snap. When I walked into the hospital room, he said he’d just woken up from a nightmare about the whole thing. He said he had that dream for years, Timmy, but this time was different, this time the German was there when he opened his eyes, standing at the foot of the bed. ‘He was here, Willy,’ he said to me. ‘Just standing there, in his uniform, staring at me.’ ”
    It had been a long time, decades in fact, since I’d heard about my father waking up in the middle of the night in terror. When I was a small boy it was not uncommon to be woken by the sound of my father’s screaming from down the hall. He had terrible nightmares for years after the war. Of course, we kids never knew the details. I remember asking my mother once what Daddy’s dreams were about. “The war, honey,” she said, “just the war.”