He saved my father, and he saved me. In fact, he saved both of us multiple times. The first instance occurred 77 years ago this December. Just before Christmas of 1942, both Tony Mellaci and my father, Alex Barris, arrived at Camp Phillips – a U.S. Army training facility in Kansas. The army had posted them there to train as medics in the U.S. Army Medical Corps. Then, something happened on Christmas Eve.
“The lieutenant told me to go to the headquarters barracks and pick up a soldier who was sick, and deliver him to the hospital. So, I and another ambulance driver picked up your father (although I didn’t know him) and took him to the hospital,” Mellaci told me. “But we never saw the sick soldier. We stayed in the cab while other medics loaded him into the ambulance.”
What then Cpl. Mellaci did not know was that my father, Cpl. Barris had a severe cold and fever, according to army records. He had a temperature of 102 degrees, with a bacterial infection in his chest, throat and sinuses. On closer examination, barracks doctors concluded my father had contagious pneumonia.
“We were about to leave and a Major told us we couldn’t,” Mellaci continued. “because we were quarantined. But we said we never even saw the guy, never touched him.” So, Mellaci only spent one night in the hospital and returned to his barracks to enjoy his Christmas dinner.
It was only after I met and interviewed Tony Mellaci, in 2015, while researching my current book about military medics, and then following the publication of Rush to Danger, last month, when Tony learned it had been my father he’d transported in his Army ambulance to the barracks hospital 77 years ago.
“I never knew until all these years later that it was your dad in the back of my ambulance,” Mellaci said. “He had been really sick.”
Treatment at the barracks hospital brought my father back to health a week later; he was released and returned to his training as a medic, alongside all his fellow corpsmen, including Cpl. Mellaci. Since Tony hailed from New Jersey, and my dad from New York, and because they both were New York Yankees fans, the two medical recruits hit it off. Their friendship would last through training, transatlantic crossing, service in France and during the Battle of the Bulge.
Events of that battle in February 1945, in the coldest winter of the Second World War and the toughest combat the Americans endured at any time during the war (90,000 casualties between January and April 1945), helped seal the comradeship of now sergeants Mellaci and Barris.
“Your dad was a runner. He led battlefront medics and stretcher bearers bringing in the wounded,” Mellaci said, “He handed the wounded off to us in the (ambulance) section.”
In other words, S/Sgt. Mellaci moved T/Sgt. Barris’s wounded to points behind the lines for serious surgery and life-saving. Just like that Christmas back in Kansas, Mellaci would come to my dad’s assistance every time he brought in wounded.
It would take another 70 years before Tony Mellaci saved me. My father had died (at age 82 in 2004) and I came across Mellaci’s name in an archive containing the records of their medical unit, the 319th Medical Battalion of the U.S. Army Corps. On a hunch I traced Mellaci to a phone number in New Jersey.
“I’m looking for Tony Mellaci,” I said on the phone from Uxbridge.
“You’ve found him,” Tony said from Jersey.
“Mr. Mellaci, my name is Ted Barris and I’m wondering if you remember my father from the war. He was a medic…”
“Al Barris?” he interrupted. “The writer? From New York?”
“You knew him?”
“Knew him? We served together in the 319th. And I’ve always wondered whatever happened to him.”
From that coincidental encounter in 2015, came a trip to visit Mr. Mellaci in Eatontown, N.J., and some of the most enriching days of my life. Tony filled in so many blanks in my knowledge of Dad’s experience in the war, including that he created a newsletter for the medical battalion, and was “a real morale booster” for his fellow medics.
In a sense, that’s how Tony saved me and my years-long book project to record my father’s and other medics’ stories of selfless heroism.
But this past weekend, when I returned to Eatontown to rejoin the Mellaci family as Tony and Sharon Mellaci celebrated their 70th wedding anniversary, I got to return Tony’s favours.
“I never thought much about what we did as medics in the war,” Tony told me during the family anniversary dinner on Sunday night. “But reading your book, I realize what Alex and I did was important. We were saving lives … not taking them.”
In a small way, I guess I’d repaid Tony for the times he’d saved my dad and me.