Bob was describing his World War II experience as a guard at the Papago POW camp in the Arizona desert near Phoenix, in what is now Scottsdale. I had heard the story at least twenty times before, but if I dared to interrupt him by throwing in one of his lines, he would grin and say “smart ass” and proceed unhindered. Bob was my uncle and I was the nephew closest to him. Although World War II was a small portion of his life, it was the formative event of his life.

We were driving east down Montana Avenue in El Paso, and, seeing a familiar cross street, he suddenly decided, in the midst of his POW narrative, that he wanted to show me a house where a woman had been murdered by the gangster John Wesley Hardin in 1949, when Bob was a crime reporter for the El Paso Times. We were looking for a restaurant to have lunch, and now he wanted to make a detour to an old crime scene.

Having talked him out of the detour, Bob was caught up in his POW story once again, telling me how fortunate he was that he never had to shoot a prisoner of war. “My attitude towards the prisoners,”he said, “changed after hearing about the death camps, and it came close to destroying me. When we made the German prisoners see the newsreels of Dachau, there was a moment of silence, then cries of ‘propaganda’ reverberated through the theater. We had some bad Nazis at the camp.”

Bob continued talking as I drove, “The leader of the prisoners was a former U-boat commander and a royal pain in the ass. On Hitler’s birthday, April 20, 1945, I made a routine inspection of the officer’s quarters and discovered he had cut a picture of Hitler from a magazine and tacked it to the wall. I walked over and ripped it off the wall, leaving the tacks. He jumped up from his cot and grabbed me violently by the arm. Instinctively, I slid my billy club out of its sheath and gave him a good crack behind the ear that sent him to the floor. He complained to the Red Cross, but I was, of course, cleared.”

“Another guy I had a problem with was an Ober Leutenant…”

Bob’s story was interrupted by an elderly driver’s un-signaled turn into our lane in front of us. Bob let out his standard admonishment in Spanish, “andelay pendeho,” which I thought meant “get out of the way, peasant.” I found out later that ‘pendeho’ didn’t mean peasant, but had a more sexual translation. I guess I, too, had picked up Bob’s phrase along the line, and my wife had to tell me it didn’t mean peasant and to stop saying it. Bob referred to almost everyone, anglo and hispanic, as “pendeho.”

Bob continued about the POW camp. ”I remember being so consumed with hate that I shook all over,’ he said. “One night, in particular, I remember relieving the guard on the tower so he could go to the latrine. As I was up there, I watched two prisoners walking for exercise around the compound. What irritated me was that, In spite of being prisoners, they exuded an atmosphere of command. These sub commanders were an arrogant bunch. I seriously wondered if I could machine gun one of these bastards and get away with it.”

”Didn’t you tell me that some of the German U-Boat officers at Papago were up for war crimes, for shelling civilians in the water after their ships went down?” I asked not so innocently.

“No, you silly bastard, you made that up,” then, realizing I had put him on, he grinned broadly, his teeth showing, and his face getting pink, wrapping his arms around his sides and scratching his ribs in excited laughter, as he often did when he got tickled. He loved a good challenge, and he reportedly had started this scratching mannerism as a highly nervous kid, or so the family claimed.

“Now listen,” he said, “and you might learn something from your good old uncle, slob.”

Bob always called everyone less intelligent than him, “slob,” but he generally made exception for me, his “favorite nephew,” as he called me in front of everyone. We had been bantering like this for years, and it was always good natured, except for a brief period in the 1960s, when I was wearing sandals, and long hair–way too liberal for him. Bob was one of those conservative Republicans who admired FDR. He was tough on defense and negative on Vietnam protesters. I used to tell him that his dad, a rare Democrat in Republican Iowa, would have horse whipped him for his Republican views. Bob never answered that. The whipping part was a little too close to home. He would change the subject.

Bob continued his story, “there were a lot of good German POWs, including Willi Schmidt, and Georg Werner, from Mainz, who taught me German. I told Werner that if he ever tried to run away, I would try to give him a break by firing one shot in the air, but the second shot, no matter how difficult to do, personally, would be right between the shoulder blades.”

Getting back on the subject of his anger, Bob explained “one night, as I sat in the machine gun nest in the guard tower, I was shaking and praying, and I had a ‘healing,’ putting it all out to God, who eased my hatred that night. You wouldn’t understand, today, how we felt about Germans and Japs then…” ”But, something happened,” Bob went on, “in addition to prayer, that shocked me out of that insane mesmerism…” ‘Mesmerism’ was a Christian Science term frequently used by the Church’s founder, Mary Baker Eddy.

”That night,” he said, “early in the evening, I was standing guard in the guard tower. There was a road that ran along next to the double wire fence which was the boundary of the confinement area. As I gazed along the fence with a spotlight, my beam picked up a jeep coming down the fence line, and running ahead of the jeep was a small dog…”

At the mention of a dog, Bob’s voice became a slight bit shaky, almost undetectable, except I knew him well. I smiled.

“What are you smiling at, you silly bastard,” Bob said, smiling himself at the fact that his emotion over dogs had been detected.

Bob resumed his story, “as I watched, the jeep came up alongside the running dog, and got ahead, the dog running for its life in mindless terror. The jeep stopped and the driver jumped out with a club and beat the dog to death with it…” Bob had to pause a second.

He continued, “this was such a brutal act that it left me stunned, and brought me back to my senses about killing anyone or anything. It took a helpless animal to bring me to my senses.”

As we were still driving, Bob, always impatient, was telling me to speed through yellow lights whenever we approached one. He would say to me “Gerade aus, John Randall, Gerade aus,” German for “proceed.” John Randall came from John Randall Dunn, a famous Christian Science hymn writer. Bob’s pressures to hurry were in good spirit, and I was used to it, and merely ignored him.

Bob continued on his POW narrative, moving on to a German escape attempt that I had heard several times before. “The German officers in the camp remained uncooperative, even if the German enlisted prisoners saw by 1944 that the end was in sight, and became more cooperative. The culmination of the officer’s resistance came on Christmas Eve, 1944, when 25 officers escaped through a tunnel which was an engineering marvel. They had planned the escape for months, and had rubber rafts which they had constructed in their barracks. And, they had, somehow, gotten civilian clothes, some dollars, and maps of the Phoenix area.”

“Based on those maps,” Bob continued, “they decided to raft down the old Arizona Canal built by ancient indians to the Salt River, and down it from Phoenix to Mexico. It was a sound plan, except the Salt River had been dry for years. Most were rounded up walking south down the empty arroyo. We really frog marched them back to camp, but they just smirked at us. Real Nazis, probably the best soldiers in the world, however. Some actually made it to Mexico, but were turned over to us by the Mexican authorities. Apparently, they thought Mexico would be more neutral, but Mexico was on the Allied side.“

“The escapees,” he went on, “were taken before courts martial held in camera. They were not told in advance of the trials, and were surprised when they were called out of morning roll call into the compound by grim soldiers who lined them up in platoon formation just outside the compound.” Bob noted that he was one of the new guards brought in at this time. “Fearful of some kind of resistance on their part, they were held grimly, with two guards apportioned to each prisoner. From the camp, they were marched out into the red rocks in a nearby portion of the desert. At this point, these former submarine officers feared that they were being taken into the desert to be shot. But, their attitude lightened as they saw their destination, a small compound with guard towers at each corner and barracks for 25 men.”

Here, Bob paused to see if I was still with him. He was seeing the events as if they happened yesterday.

“They were halted at the gates and told they would be imprisoned for two weeks under harsh conditions on a ration of sixteen ounces of bread a day and all the water they could drink.” Bob smiled at the memory, saying “there was much hilarity on the part of the prisoners when they learned of the punishment, in comparison with what would have been meted out in Germany. As names were called out, each prisoner swaggered into the new compound, no doubt secretly relieved.”

Bob stopped talking and started humming “Eine Kleine Nacht Musik,” one his favorite Mozart pieces. He knew all the classical works and could bring them up at will, humming them and jabbing the air with an imaginary baton, and going “dah, dah, dah, et cetera.” I knew this interruption in the life story of Bob Dodd meant he was thinking of food, always the Bob Dodd top priority. I also knew, given our location by now, that we would end up at Heinz’s family restaurant, a Swiss chalet-style steak house, with plush black leather dining chairs and a rather dark, velvet interior. It was a high class continental restaurant, with excellent German cuisine.

Bob never stooped to fast food dives, which to him were made for “Slobovius Americanus.” He always went first class, eating only one or two meals a day, but making those meals good ones. As he got older, he dispensed with the huge breakfast, and, thus, avoided my usual comment that: “you could take the boy out of the country, but not the country out of the boy.” Any reference to the farm boy was dangerous, however, since he could end up doing realistic crow calls at the table– “caw, caw, caw.” Bob was not often hungry, but made up for it with voracious eating habits when he did eat, usually cramming his mouth with food and talking with his mouth open while eating. This was good material for my cousins’ imitations of Bob.

“How about we stop at Jay Heinz’s,” Bob said, rubbing the palms of his hands together as if to warm them up, excited at the idea, which had just come to him. Grinning at me with a ‘let’s do it’ big toothy grin in anticipation, he clasped his sides and scratched them in excitement. I maneuvered into the right lane, since Heinz’s would be on that side.

“Sounds good.”

“Of course its good, if your old Uncle Bob says so.”

I had to admit that i always looked forward to Heinz’s. We always ordered the same thing, goulash. The proprietors, Jay and his father, “Pappy” Heinz, were friends of Bob’s, and would always come over and join us in Bob’s usual booth. Bob had several restaurants where he had “his” booth, his entitled standtisch as he called it. The discussions with the Heinzes were on an intellectual plane, assessing Toscanini, Camus, Freud, Richard Strauss, and other artists and Central European philosophers.

Over lunch, Bob was recounting our recent trip to the Civil War battlefields in Virginia, telling Jay about his grandfather, Sam Hindman, a Civil War veteran from an Ohio regiment, had fought at Gettysburg and marched in veterans’ parades in Winterset, Iowa as an old man. Bob described how he and I had followed Grant’s 1864 campaign through the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor, and Petersburg. Using his almost photographic memory, Bob quoted the battlefield marker near Spotsylvania, which stated that 60,000 union troops had marched south along this road on a beautiful summer day of May 4, 1864, singing marching songs, little knowing that 20,000 of their number would not be returning with the survivors along this same road at the end of the next day’s battle. This marker had a profound effect on us, emphasizing the importance of fate in life. It was one of our historical icons.

Bob would often tell me how fate had taken him out of harm’s way when he was on maneuvers in Louisiana on Christmas Eve, 1942. According to his telling, he had just completed 24 hour guard duty with a splitting headache, and was looking forward to some time in the rack to sleep it off, when the Charge of Quarters came in and said everyone up, all hands have to help load rail cars. Bob protested, but found himself on the landing, still nursing a headache.

A jeep drove up and a Captain of the 254th Signal Corps Construction Company jumped out, calling for volunteers to join his unit which was shipping out immediately. He needed replacements for men on furlough and couldn’t make calls because of wartime security. Bob, partially out of anger and partially out of pain, quickly stepped forward and was signed up. He and five other volunteers joined their new unit on the train, where Bob got some badly needed sleep. The train then continued to Tucson, and then to Oakland, where the unit got malarial shots and shipped out to the Pacific.

After leaving Louisiana that night, the first they knew of their destination was on the train, realizing they were heading west to the Pacific coast rather than east to the Atlantic and European theater. As it turned out, of Bob and the five others who volunteered on that rail platform on Christmas Eve, only one was killed in combat. The unit Bob left that Christmas Eve, on the other hand, saw tough action at the Bulge and had a very low survivor rate. I always found it interesting that a one- in- six fatality rate was good. It was a tough war obviously.

We left the restaurant after our lunch, with Jay Heinz walking us to the door an asking about my folks. Getting into our car, Bob announced“prepare to depart,” a joke, which referred back to his return to the states from Hawaii during the war.  Apparently, as his ship had passed under the Golden Gate in 1944, a ship’s loudspeaker had bellowed out “prepare to disembark,” which, to the servicemen on board, sounded like “prepare to depart,” causing one angry solider to yell back furiously to the Captain’s bridge “hell no, we haven’t even arrived. I’m not going anywhere.” As a result, “prepare to depart” became a catch phrase bellowed by Bob, imitating a ship loudspeaker, anytime we we about to depart for anywhere.

During our travels together, Bob had introduced me to his numerous vignettes involving history, classical music, and his favorite writers. For Henry Miller, he would quote Tropic of Cancer about the fireman putting out a blaze at a Boston hospital and then taking liberties with the nurses. From Dylan Thomas, it was Bob’s personal mantra, “do not go gently into that last good night, fight, fight, against the dying of the light.” He would also quote Faulkner on the subject of Memphis, that ‘the Mississippi Delta starts the the lobby of the Peabody Hotel.’” And, he was particularly fond of quoting Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon on bull fighting: ”the cow was never born that could drop the bull that could drop Joselito.”

In fact, Bob knew bull fighting first hand, having fought bulls in Mexico after the war. When I was a kid, he would take the entire family to bullfights at the huge Plaza Monumental bull ring in Juarez, leading us to the back of the arena, to the stalls where they kept the bulls. From these stalls, the bulls would charge out into the ring, into the light. This was the most exciting moment, since the bulls seemed so confident and scary and fast at first. There was no slowing them down. They would go in to the ring fast and charge across the diameter of the ring at full speed sometimes, just getting to know the turf and showing their displeasure. The bullfighter would appear from behind the fence and the bull would see him, spinning around and going right after him.

Bob had killed 36 bulls over two years, from 1946-47, and was, thus, able to explain to me the finer points of bullfighting, pointing out the bulls’ favorite place in the ring, the “querencia,” where it would be dangerous to go in after the bull. If someone was to die in that space, Bob would say, the bull will do the killing.

Bob would recall his last bullfight, in Tijuana, where he was worn out and weak in the terrible heat, and unable to kill the final, third, bull. He had to go into the bull’s territory, and remembered realizing that the bull was getting smarter as the fight went on, learning “Spanish,” as bullfighters say, starting to look for the man behind the cape. Bob would talk about the sick feeling in his stomach and in his mouth, that came with his fear of this particular, dangerous bull, amid the booing of the crowd. There was no way out, no way to just walk away or run out of the ring.

Bob was a good friend of a former bullfighter named Carlos Arusa, who raised fighting bulls at his nearby ranch in Chihuahua named Pasteje. Bob would drop by to watch Arusa’s staff training novice bullfighters on calves, recalling Arusa himself taunting a bull to make charge, saying “Mire, Manso, Mire Manso,” or ‘come on tame one, the one who can be bullied.’ The word “Manso” seemed to infuriate the bulls. Unfortunately, Arusa, who fought many bulls as a bandarillo, was killed in a car accident, so I never got to meet him. He was another one of Bob’s heroes.

Bob had been everywhere, and he showed me a lot of his stops. Boone, Iowa was where Mamie Eisenhower got sick, and my grandmother befriended her. Des Moines was the Tramor Ballroom where my parents met. San Francisco was the Cow Palace, Angel Island, and Pier 19 at the Embarcadero, where Bob had been billeted during the war, prior to shipping out. Bob showed me where all the soldiers had slept on the floor of the Cow Palace, and spoke of seeing Lana Turner, who gave some of the soldiers kisses as she left the USO show.

White Sands was where Bob saw Nike missiles tested. Los Alamos led to his descriptions of the making of the atom bomb, and the importance of the lens mold. Juarez was a court house where he interviewed the man who assassinated Trotsky. Ft. Ord was where he and I were stationed during different generations. Carizozo is where he and his dog Rusty slept on the lava beds while prospecting for uranium.

Bob was not successful in the conventional sense, working intermittently as a salesman and technical writer. He spent his time jogging and reading. He could not hold a job, but he was an intellectual and he lived a very full life. His stories and our travels together gave me a romantic outlook on life, and they also gave me an identity, fixing me in time and place, as part of a family and nation moving from the Civil War to World War II and beyond. Slob that I was, I did listen to my good old uncle, and I did learn some things.