Q: Who is the most dangerous person you’ve ever met?

A: This guy:

The meme in another answer here, “the old guy shuffling around town was at one time more badass than you will ever be”, is kinda personal for me. That’s my dad, in a wheelchair at my nephew’s wedding.

He doesn’t look dangerous, does he?

Even in this picture from 65 years before, he doesn’t look that dangerous:

I was born in 1954, so my dad, my uncles, and most of their peers had served in one manner or another during WWII. I assumed — incorrectly, as it turned out — that my friends also had dads with Purple Heart and Bronze Star boxes in their dresser drawers, and assorted US and German military weapons and ammo in the closet, including several Lugers and some SS insignia and paraphernalia.

Likewise, I assumed that my cousins and friends had heard stories about things like diving into a fox hole with your pants still around your ankles, because the German 88’s had opened up while you were taking a dump. Or, about using a BAR to take out a German half-track at 500+ yards by putting rounds through the 4″ slot on the front windshield cover. Well, maybe not that one — my dad was a better shot than anyone I knew, and had been recognized as a “Regimental Marksman” on his discharge papers.

But all that was just normal to me.

I still remember the day it dawned on me that maybe Daddy wasn’t ‘typical’ after all: I was in my late teens, and was reading an article about mass murderers, including Richard Speck. The article was going on and on about the HUGE numbers of murders committed by such people — 8 nurses in Speck’s case.

And the thought went through my mind, “Oh, that’s not that many — I know Daddy has killed a dozen or more”. I knew that, just from the award citations and from stories he told. And late in his life, I found out there were more he didn’t tell me about when I was a boy.

Of course, there’s a difference between combat and murder. Daddy wasn’t a murderer. But still, I thought the article’s focus on the large number killed was peculiar, since there were LOTS of guys around the US who’d killed many more than Richard Speck.

But eventually, it dawned on me that it had to be unusual to be the son of a man who’d killed a dozen or more people. The math doesn’t work otherwise: if you have two opposing companies of 200 men men, even if all the men die, only 20 of those soldiers can each kill 10 off their opponents, before all combatants are dead. That’s only 1 out of 10 combat infantrymen! And Daddy had killed, all by himself, a dozen or more.

It was a few years later when I read a study of combat infantry that reported, in typical combat units, 10 - 20% of the soldiers accounted for 90% of the opposing casualties, and that most of the rest of the soldiers end up just being there as ‘camouflage’ for the actual killers. [Several commenters, below have pointed to several recent works that report on this phenomenon. I’m currently reading “On Killing”

OK, that made the math work: Daddy and maybe a dozen other men in his company were the actual killers. The rest were there, risking their lives, providing support and being wounded or killed themselves . . . but not actually killing any of the “Krauts” themselves. They earned, and deserved, their “CIB” badges, as combat infantrymen. But they still weren’t actually killers.

My dad was.

My dad partially discovered this himself, many years later when he went to a company reunion, and instead of the 100 or so survivors of the original company he expected, there were over 300 men present. It turned out that most of those who’d come to the reunion had been in combat for only few days before being wounded, evacuated, and sent home without returning to combat.

I don’t think he ever did the math, and realized that he, and a few others he knew, were the exception, and accounted for almost all the casualties attributed to his company. So, yeah. My dad was, at one time, a tremendous “badass”. He wasn’t a murderer, but he was, along with a few others in his company, a killer.

But if you had met him by the time my Mother married him in 1953, you’d have never guessed it. Through him, I have gotten to know a few other “killers” from WWII or Vietnam. And if they didn’t tell you, you’d have never guessed it about them, either.

And yeah, he “shuffled around town” till about 6 years ago.

The moment in the drafty church at smokerise

Footnotes