Daniel C. Guiet - Scholars of Mayhem: My Father’s Secret War in Nazi-Occupied France

I stood with my father, Jean Claude Guiet, by a corrugated metal hangar at the Lons-le-Saunier airport in eastern France, watching a blue-and-white Cessna 182 make its final approach. Jean Claude did not allow the anticipation he felt to show in his expression. It was 9:00 A.M. on a sunny summer day that promised to build into a very hot Jura afternoon. A single tattered wind sock fluttered in the light breeze.

The Cessna was an old one, perfectly ordinary, except that someone had removed its transponder, the device that would have identified it to air traffic controllers. Its pilot was Bob Maloubier, a seventy-seven-year-old Frenchman wearing Ray-Bans and a handlebar mustache. In the copilots seat rode his friend and former wife, Catherine, a beautiful and easygoing woman some twenty years his junior.

Five days before, on June 24, 2000, Bob and Jean Claude had been reunited for the first time since the liberation of Paris in 1944. They had both attended the opening of a museum in Wormelow, England, devoted to the memory of Violette Szabo, an English secret agent who was a heroine of the French Resistance. Bob, who stood six foot four, wore a chest full of medals and ribbons. Jean Claude, who was five ten, wore none of his. Their handshake turned into a long embrace. My God, Jean, youve gotten very old! Bob said in French. Jean Claude replied, I am still six months younger than you.

The museum opening was a merry hubbub of war veterans, politicians, even a few movie stars, and the newspaper reporters and BBC film crew competing to interview them. It was no place for a real conversation. So Bob and Jean Claude agreed to have a private reunion at the little chteau where my wife, Carol, and I spend summers in Nevy-sur-Seille, a village of 250 souls in the Jura region. Bob would fly in from Paris, where he lived. They would have a chance to go over the extraordinary history they had shared with Violette, and also news about the fifty-six years since they had seen each other last.

We watched the Cessna descend toward the grassy airstrip bordered by white-painted rocks. My fathers face betrayed nothing. I was aflame with curiosity, especially as I knew that the wartime records of the unit both men had served with had finally been declassified. My father, a discreet, formal, French-born Americana perfectionist in all he didhad never spoken of things that were officially secret.

My thoughts drifted to the tin bread box that had traveled with our family everywhere the government-supplied moving vans took us during my peripatetic childhood. It was light gray, painted with pink hibiscus flowers. Wherever we livedapartment, hotel, shanty, or housethe box would be tucked away in a hard-to-reach spot in my fathers bedroom closet. There was never any food in itit gave off no scent of crackers, bread, or nuts. Rather it smelled faintly of rubberized plastic, with undertones of old leather and canvas. We children didnt have to be told never to touch it; the box, it was understood, was strictly off-limits.

Opening it required considerable strength in the fingertips, I discovered at age five. We were living in a Quonset hut on Saipan that year, 1956. My parents and my older sister were outside on the beach, taking in a picture-perfect Pacific sunset. The tin bread box had been placed within my reach for once, on the Quonset huts floor among crates and suitcases, as we were preparing to move yet again. I got my fingers under the narrow, rolled lip of the lid, popped it, and peered inside.

I didnt understand most of the things I found. The .45 automatic was not a mystery, to be sure; I removed it carefully, along with five full clips. There were three slim knives, about four to ten inches long, in leather sheaths with straps. There was also a length of wire with a wooden handle at each end.

There were thin pieces of paper, four inches square, titled Field Station to Home Station and Home Station to Field Station, with tiny type printed on them in sequences of five random letters. There were black-and-white photos, with scalloped white borders, of men roasting monkeys in a jungle.

I found passports and identification cards that bore my fathers photograph but names that were not his. There was a compass. A small green box, bound with a fat rubber band, contained narrow bits of metal with quarter-inch round wooden handlesa set of lock rakes, as I later learned. There were large silk squares imprinted with different countries flags, bearing messages in unfamiliar alphabets. The messages, I discovered much later, were variations on a theme: I am an American. Take me to the nearest Allied military office. You will be paid.

I put everything back into the box in the correct sequence and snapped the lid shut.

The Cessna kissed the runway, its wheels sinking a little way into the grass, and taxied to the hangar. Bob and Catherine climbed out of the plane and into our car. It was a short ride to the chteau, along the bank of the Seille River, through the village, through our gated wall, past our little vineyard and trout pond and up to the 250-year-old house. We settled on the terrace with coffee.