UNKNOWN SOLDIERS: Reliving WWII in Europe

our dwindling Platoon was reduced to recon patrol liaison to confirm the positions and status of incommunicado flanking units, mainly the British Black Cats on our left.

From the day those burp-gun bees buzzed over my head on the mountain trail and the incoming mortar shells dropped between me and home, brain and body discovered an unfamiliar neural pathway that pointed toward survival. It was the saving irrelevance of my situation that by lucking out of the Camp Croft officer lottery I escaped the insane vulnerability of up-front field leadership, and that a second intervention rescued me from the crapshoot of riflemanship in Third Battalion under fire up there right now at the Overpass, if I’d lived so long.

Somewhere between my eyebrows and the back of my skull lurks the old, gray software of what I did or didn’t do, what I endured, saw, heard or felt as a brash kid, you might say, thirty-five hundred miles from home sixty-four years ago. Yet to this day those neurons imprinted so long ago will not loosen their grip except for the few that perhaps randomly, then again perhaps not, seem to have eluded the bonds of silence or denial as if to reassure the rest: “It’s all right. Calm yourselves. Go back to sleep. These scraps are enough to placate the incursions of his consciousness, and his conscience.”

For example, there’s this persistent image of the Tommies (as characterized by our fathers of the First War) of whom I wrote home when the crisis had passed: “I have the most profound admiration for the British. They’re systematic, hard, dogged fighters. Under stress they’re the coolest men I’ve ever seen, and they somehow manage to preserve a humor withal that is marvelous. Even on the front they shave and wash every day (our ears tingle!). An honor to fight beside them.” (Well, not quite every day.) “Ragged, dirty, gaunt, and so beat,” I remembered as an afterthought. And droll, as I wrote home some time later:

One day one of the boys from our Company was passing by a battery of Limey 12- pounders that was about to fire a mission. Never having fired an artillery piece, he asked if he could pull the lanyard on one. “Right enough,” they said. When the order came, all the guns roared except his. He tugged and tugged without success. Finally, after a heavy pull, it fired. He apologized for the delay, but the gunner said, “Oh, that’s all right, ole boy. When Jerry thinks the last one’s come in, ’e’ll stick ’is ’ead up an’ ’ave a look around, an’ that’s when we’ll get ’im with yours!”

Yah, growled Dilks, “and come four o’clock in the afternoon, if the Limey artillery was backin’ you up, ferget it, because they just gotta have their cup o’ tea.”

About that time Griff took me and Jimmy Dowdall on a contact patrol to locate a British unit on our immediate left. I recorded in my journal:

We walked through a steep-banked gully with good enfilade, then had to go over the top and race across a field some distance toward a lone house, in plain view, I think we figured, of the enemy. Very fearful of machine gun fire—ran like hell. Seems to me that from the house somehow we ran for another wadi, parallel to the front [it was the front] and found a Limey platoon, pretty exhausted, sort of half dug in and strung out along the bank. They were cheerful, glad to see us, made us tea. Kraut mortars came