Albert Likes Blum Senior was not a likely war hero. He grew up in Gloversville, New York, his name a joint branding effort of the Norman Blum & Co. glove manufacturer and the Likes, Berwanger & Co. department store of Baltimore, Maryland (their famous catchphrase: “Everybody Likes Berwanger!”), and volunteered for the infantry in World War II in part to escape his Jewish upbringing. When he came back he had the bloody papers of a teenage Nazi whose head he’d seen caved in by a grenade in the Harz Mountains, a jagged bolt of shrapnel in his thigh, and a fist of untellable stories in his head. Beverly Beck, whose Methodist family had emigrated from Germany in the 1870s, was the most gentile woman he could find.
Norm, Dad, and their siblings never thought of themselves as Jews. The family celebrated Christmas for the sake of form but worshipped no god but success. Beverly managed to talk Al Senior out of the names he had decided on for his boys during the war—King, Prince, and Duke—but Al still raised them to be winners in the striving American mold, shorn of their tribal history of repression and neurosis. Second place was as good as losing. Whining was as good as quitting. Disputes were settled in the basement boxing ring, battles that repeated themselves on ice rinks, baseball diamonds, football fields, and lakes around upstate New York.
For Dad and Fred, the Vietnam War and the Summer of Love cast a more sinister light on Al Senior’s military exploits. Norm was born in 1957, just past the draft registration window, too late to be affected in the same way. His older brothers may have found war uninteresting or worse, but Norm had a boyish curiosity. The fact that Al Senior had killed Nazis and possessed the trophies to prove it had always lent authority to his demands that the boys strap on gloves to beat each other senseless in the basement boxing ring, but he never talked about his service at home. On the only occasion he ever took his youngest son out to dinner alone, Norm seized the opportunity to press him about the war.
“I was really interested,” Norm explained to me. “He was in Battle of the Bulge, he was in D-Day plus one or two, a lot of the nastiest shit. He got demoted for punching a superior, because he wasn’t really good with rules. He said, ‘When you’re in a battle, most of these pussies wouldn’t even fire their rifle. Your fighting force of a hundred, it might be a force of twenty or forty, because most guys shied from the fight.’ I guess that’s why Dad was exposed on a fifty-caliber machine gun, because he wasn’t afraid to shoot and get shot at. There were three stories he told me.”
Norm launched them across the table the way his father had, as if daring me to blink.
“He and his best buddy went out for a smoke. It was a pretty active area. They were leaning against this tree, and then all you heard was a machine gun. His buddy got cut in half.” Norm traced a diagonal line across his torso.
“Another one: It was early in the morning, before sunrise. Germans, they carry these lanterns, so if you see a lantern outside the perimeter when you’re on watch, you don’t ask any questions. You shoot. So he saw one, shot, soldier goes down, next morning it turns out it was an African American guy in his own platoon that he had killed.
“Let’s see, the next one was … Oh. You see it in these old World War Two films, where they’ve got this farmhouse surrounded and there’s a bunch of Germans inside. They’re shooting, they’re lobbing mortars, they’re throwing grenades, and the place bursts into flames and these Germans come running out on fire. They’re saying, ‘Mama, mama.’ You just pick one out and you shoot ’em. He went up afterward and checked their papers, and they were twelve-, thirteen-, fourteen-year-old Hitler Youths.
“Oh, right,” Norm said, “there was one more. He and another guy, they killed all these Germans. There’s this pit, they’re just going to throw all these bodies in. He said it was a hundred degrees out, it was freaking stinking to high heaven. He said, ‘I got the arms, my buddy’s got the legs. One, two …’” Norm mimed swinging. “Both the guy’s arms pulled off. Dad was sitting there holding two arms.” He dropped the tough-guy act and gave me a look. “How do you relate to that shit?”
To Norm, these stories were yet another wall between himself and a father who had taken the whole family to all of Al Junior’s high school football games but had never attended more than one or two of Norm’s baseball and hockey games. When he passed sanitized versions on to his children years later, it seemed only fitting to burnish them a little, as tribute to the grandfather they would never have a chance to meet. He didn’t expect them to become objects of lasting fascination. But Alex thought they were awesome. He told them to any friend who would listen.
A recruiter first called Alex in December, having gotten his number from Andrew. Over the ensuing months they met about half a dozen times at the recruitment center in the strip mall across from the Family Sports Ice Arena, where Alex had first started skating so many years before. Soon he told his dad the recruiter wanted to meet him too.
“So we went to the recruiter,” Norm recalled, “Sergeant So-and-so, a big studly handsome guy who was Alex’s new hero. I tried to be open-minded. I said, ‘Okay, Alex’s goal is to be a Ranger.’ The guy says, ‘Yeah, everyone’s goal is to be a Ranger.’ I said, ‘Can you tell us some statistics about what the chances are?’ He says, ‘No, that’s classified.’ I said, ‘Well, would you say it’s very unlikely?’ He says, ‘Yeah, it’s very unlikely.’ I’m sitting there thinking, ‘Certainly Alex has asked these questions. Certainly Alex knows that this hill is much taller than most people are going to be able to climb.’”
Norm liked Sergeant So-and-so. He has always respected obvious physical fitness, and he appreciated the sergeant’s hard-assed realism. It did not then occur to him that this was exactly the kind of reverse psychology that kids with hero complexes respond to best.
“I thanked the guy. He was candid. He didn’t pull any punches. I appreciated that. We went outside. Alex says, ‘Dad, are you going to be disappointed if I join the army?’”
At this, something happened in Norm’s face that I had never seen before. He was looking to me for recognition of how crushing it was to hear a son ask if you were disappointed in him, an experience I had not yet come close to having myself.
“I said, ‘Of course not. My concern is just to help you see outside your tunnel vision that this is your calling in life. Maybe you should consider going to school for two years and then joining the army.’ He said, ‘Dad, I really want to do this.’ I said, ‘Okay, buddy, look’—we’re driving home now—I said, ‘I’ll give you twenty thousand bucks and you can travel in Europe for a year or two. Get some worldly experience. Come back and see how you feel about joining the army.’ He said, ‘I have no interest in that.’”
Over the next few weeks the full interrogative weight of Norm’s social world came to bear on Alex. The results are apparent in their letters to Judge Burgess.
Jeff “Bud” Ahbe, Alex’s boss at the hockey camp, where he coached kids between the ages of six to ten: I questioned Alex personally … he said this was what he wanted to do. Richard Bell, family friend: During conversations prior to Alex’s enlistment it became clear he wanted to serve his country … proudly accepted the inherent risks. Becca Casarez, family friend: … long discussion regarding his future … very confident in his decision … proud to be a Ranger. Frank and Barbara Kelley, neighbors whose house Alex tended when they were gone: Visited us just prior to entering the military … determined to become part of the armed forces.
Norm’s final gambit was to arrange for Alex to have lunch with his friend and colleague Bill Hemphill, a retired colonel in the U.S. Army who had commanded an infantry company in Vietnam and gone through Ranger School himself. Hemphill’s greatest point of pride was that despite ample opportunity he had never gotten a single one of his men killed. The plan was for him to play the realist for Alex, as Norm could not do himself.
In about a year and a half, Hemphill too would be