Leonide D. Carrier: Remembering Dad on Veterans Day

Leonide D. Carrier (1912-2003)

If you define a hero as someone who has been honored for his valor and courage under fire, then my father didn't fit the bill.

But there are other definitions of heroism.

Leonide Daniel Carrière (my Québec-born grandfather William Carrière dropped the final "e" after Dad came along) was a member of what Tom Brokaw has called the Greatest Generation. Born to Franco-American parents in Southbridge, Mass., the first of three sons, he was drafted into the Army in 1942, when he was already 30 and hoping to get married. 

Dad started out in an artillery unit. He expected to end up on the front lines. But his right knee locked up at sea; he couldn't walk. When his outfit landed in North Africa, he had to stay behind for surgery while his buddies headed to war. The operation was a success. Once Dad recovered, he was transferred to the 136th Military Police Co., with which he served in North Africa and Italy.

So, my father did not see combat. He did not earn a Purple Heart, like my late uncle, Albert Archambeault, my mother's brother, who was wounded in France. Dad did not receive a Bronze Star, like my wife’s late uncle, Alfred Mello, who fought on during one battle in France as the lone surviving machine gunner in his outfit.

Instead, Dad was an MP. His wartime stories involved, not battlefield heroics, but touching personal vignettes.

Like the fact that he failed to reach his fiancée (my mother, Rita) when he called her unexpectedly from North Carolina to say goodbye as his unit shipped out ahead of schedule. Mom was out shopping, picking up a new hat for a planned rendezvous with her future husband in New York before his outfit sailed. Preoccupied with seeing him, she lost out on her last chance to speak with him by phone before he deployed.

Like the remarkably tall soldiers from Senegal whom he met in Casablanca. He was intimidated by their fearsome-looking scimitars, but they befriended him because French was his first language, and theirs as well.

Like the British soldiers he encountered who, as my father once put it, “were friendly enough, but they talked so fast I never could make out too much of what they were saying.”

Like the heart-stopping terror of seeing German bombers over North Africa at night, the sky alight with Allied anti-aircraft fire.

Like the time he went to midnight Mass in St. Peter’s Square in Rome on Christmas Day.

Like the Army buddy who took tons of pictures when he and Dad went to Switzerland on leave, and then promised to send the negatives to my father stateside, but never did.

Like the fact that Dad and my mother (they married in 1946) wrote to each other almost every day during the years that they were apart, usually in English, but sometimes in French.

Like the frighteningly rough crossing when he finally sailed home late in 1945 aboard a storm-tossed aircraft carrier.

Dad was discharged from the Army as a private first class on Dec. 8, 1945. He once told me, somewhat apologetically, that he never got a shot at a promotion because he was "just an MP."

But he did his part in that rare thing -- a just war -- when the forces of light and darkness wrestled for control of the world. He showed up. He was prepared to face the enemy, if fate decreed it. He knew the meaning of duty. And that makes him a hero in my book.