Remembering Veterans on Veteran's Day

War. I grew up a little different than most kids. I always knew the cost of war was not always left on the battle field . How could it possibly be! Watching bullets or shrapnel ripping the flesh of your best friends and comrades, possibly blowing their limbs off, or head, or cutting you in half in less than a blink of an eye is not something a young man of 17 or 20 or 25 can witness without having THOSE dreams every night for the rest of their life. Those distant eyes. A person there, but not really there.

Survivors of the war suffer, in many ways, worse then those who died on the battlefield, for their suffering, however terrible it was, is over. But having those dreams, those ever present nightmares. Years of the same explosions and screams and pain. Horrific memories of the crying children and grown men yelling out for their mothers after bad wounds to the gut. The incredible indignities perpetrated upon survivors taken prisoner, and living the shame attached to that. The endless suffering and terror that echo forever within their very souls. Knowing today that the best they could ever hope for is not forgetting the experiences, only how to make it through another day alive and as peaceful as possible. Sometimes that was , and is, done any way possible. And so it was with my father.

My father was captured in the Battle of the Bulge. He spent the rest of WWII in a prison camp deep within Germany . He and many, many others suffered through cold, shoeless winters, potato peel soup as a daily ration, lice, typhus, and because of the lack of any fruit, Berri-Berri. When he was captured he weighed 172 pounds. At wars end he weighed 121 pounds. He, and his comrades we made to work at hard labor. He spent over a year stateside in a military hospital in San Diego trying to recover from his various illnesses obtained while in German captivity. He would only say this about it...if he had to do it over, he would have gladly died than being taken prisoner. I never doubted that what he said was the truth.

My father would not discuss the events that occurred during his time in uniform. On occasion, when we would play with our small plastic soldiers and tanks he would instruct us on "setting up fields of fire' and "defilades for cover" and "artillery support" and how useless bazookas really were in comparison to Tiger tanks. Little by slow the details would leak out. But as quickly as the words would be spoken, he would start to retract. You could see the pain etched across his face as if it were all happening again. The points were absolutely never followed up. It was Dad, after all...how at that young age could you think of saying something? But you could literally feel the agony of your own father. And somehow you knew the whole WAR thing was not as easy as you originally thought.

The Battle of the Bulge was not some romantic incident, it was abject, brutal terror inflicted upon mostly 17 and 18 year old kids who had their 90 days basic training and that's about it. It was a nightmare for everyone on both sides it touched. That movie with Henry Fonda was just that..a lousy story made up by Hollywood that can not possibly render the actual event or the actual feelings of the men who fought it. How could it?

The true irony of it all was the fact that our next door neighbor in Boston was an immigrant who came over from Germany after the war. My father was a private man, and did not know his neighbor of 7 years had served as a member of the Wehrmacht during WWII. The man was a German equivalent of a G.I.. He spent what seemed an entire afternoon at the fence side , talking to his neighbor. These two one-time opponents talked about something only they could discuss. A tiny, private world. They eventually parted, and I recall asking my father if he liked the man now. He shook his head and flatly said, "No, I hate him." I never saw my father ever acknowledge his existence again.

My father died an alcoholic. In many ways , growing up in that home was like reliving some of his worst wartime experiences, the anger, fear, terror, the shame. Looking back, being so young, it was not possible to divorce the drama I was living out with him from the experiences he himself had suffered that made our own lives hell. It was not possible to look back with any understanding of his hell, his terror, that would never, did never, go away. Only much, much later as an adult was I able to see what was really going on. What a terrible thing a War is. How ravaged each person who has experienced it must be, at least in some small way. I doubt it to be very small, actually.

Remember all our Veterans who served our country to keep us free. In many ways, those who served, always serve the rest of their lives. War is a forever experience and leaves you changed in the most profound ways. It creates those tiny, private worlds that are impenetrable to us all who have not witnessed it. Remember them always, regardless of when and where they served. May God bless them and keep them close.