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My father's handshake
By Paul Michaud
As the world enters with trepidation a new year and attempts to place behind itself an eventful twelve months which brought to the fore a new US policy that seemingly favours arm-twisting and arrogance to the detriment of dialogue and discussion, this writer is reminded of his father, an American GI who took part in the landing on Omaha Beach in 1944 and went on to spend the rest of his life proclaiming his preference for the good old-fashioned handshake.

And as he left us in February of 2000, two days after his 83rd birthday, I'm happy that he wasn't around to see what US forces did around the world last year where the handshake, long associated by my father with the proper way that men, indeed military, should behave towards each other, was replaced not only with the practice of forcefully twisting the arm of one's enemy, but also the art of the stab-in-the-back, something we'd learn to despise and associate rather with the "sneak attack" on Pearl Harbor on that "day of infamy," a sultry Sunday of December 1941. Back then, an American soldier never did such things and the Japanese, for having done so, were from that point on treated with ignominy, if not contempt. Stabbing an opponent in the back was something you just didn't do.

That handshake, indeed, became one of my father's trademarks over the years and for as long as I can remember, he would always accompany it with the great boxer John L. Sullivan's boast: "Shake the hand that shook the world!" And like John L. Sullivan, my father was a perfect gentleman, a man who taught us how to behave well with others, how to open the door for the ladies, how to tip your hat when passing a church. He was a phenomenal source of savoir vivre and savoir faire. He was indeed a gentleman, but also a gentle - man.

He was a very simple man, a humble man, a man who could argue pretty well his points of view, especially those not to everybody's liking - in this he would have made a fantastic lawyer - but who was always ready to listen to the other guy, even give him reason when he'd been proved wrong. And, in this world where an-eye-for-an-eye seems to have become the going thing, my father knew how to turn the other cheek. It was something he taught his children well.

Once in grade school, I'd been unfairly thrown off the bus that brought us home. When my father was told what had happened, instead of fighting back, he told me simply: tomorrow you take the bus as if nothing happened, go shake the driver's hand, and tell him you're sorry. Which is what I did. The driver, who'd expected me to fight back, was befuddled. Rather than be right, said my father (another idea of his that he constantly hammered in): it's more important to set a good example to others. That is what counts. My father could be said to be magnanimous - he had what in French we call grandeur d'ame. He had soul.

I remember a visit we paid to Normandy in 1989, 45 years after his landing on a PT boat on French soil, the first time a member of our family had returned to the country, France, we'd left behind more than three centuries earlier to settle in the New World where we'd arrived, we liked to say, before Plymouth Rock and 1620. We were at a cemetery located on Nationale 13, at La Cambe, which through some strange twist of fate had started as a burial ground for some of my father's US comrades-in-arms but had become the final resting place for the German soldiers that they'd defeated during skirmishes under the apple trees on both sides of N13, to this day the principal access road to Paris.

On that day in October, 1989 we chanced upon a group of strange tourists, they were members of the Panzer division that had attempted to block the access of my father and his fellow GIs to Paris in August, 1944, when they went on to liberate the French capital. It was a strange sight to see my father's former opponents, so much larger-than-life; my father was hardly five feet eight, the German tourists a good head taller. I made the mistake of telling the Germans that while they were billeted on that side of the road during the summer of 1944, my father and his men were only a few feet away on the other side making preparations to take their jeeps and tanks and force their way to Paris. Their reaction was more than I'd expected, and for a moment my mother Marie-Marthe, girlfriend Isabelle and I feared that my unfortunate revelation might have set off World War III. But my father, all by himself, very calmly put out his hand, offered it to each man in turn, with the fateful words: "No more war."

His handshake, as usual, had its effect and World War III did not break out after all on that day in October of 1989, and I wish frankly that somebody among the US soldiers in Iraq or Afghanistan or wherever else American might is presently being deployed so ignominiously and deceitfully by the Bushes, Rumsfelds and Wolfowitzes of this world, might try the same approach to human relations: better seek peace among men, and love thy neighbour, as my father would say, rather than attempt to force him to do something against his will that one day or another will inevitably reverberate into one of those eye-for-an-eye vicious circles that seem perpetually endless and, if anything, will only bring about the very World War III that my father's handshake in Normandy seemed so calmly and magnanimously to have spared us.

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