My father rarely spoke about his experiences in the army during World War II. I know about the Purple Heart that collected dust in his dresser drawer and the remains of the bullet the field surgeons extracted from his back.
What else do I know about his years in the army? I know he didn’t like military discipline. My father was anything but a radical, but the idea of following orders, especially illogical ones, did not suit his anti-authoritarian temperament.
I also know he experienced antisemitism in the person of his company’s colonel. This colonel insisted that Jews were cowards and underrepresented among the combat troops. My father, the company’s staff sergeant, took it upon himself to highlight all the Jewish surnames on the company roster and submitted it to the colonel, just to prove him wrong. I guess my father was not lacking in chutzpah. (He later admitted to me that he padded the list with a few non-Jewish German and Polish surnames!)
When the movie “Saving Private Ryan” came out, my father rather pointedly did not go to see it. However, he did use the occasion to share with me, finally, the story of how he came to be severely wounded.
It was during the last stages of the Battle of the Bulge in the winter of 1945. The Allies had regained the momentum and were retaking French villages that had been lost to the Germans just a few weeks earlier. My 26-year-old father was ordered to lead an advance guard of newly arrived teenage soldiers into a French village. Their purpose? To attract sniper fire so that the snipers could be located and neutralized. Essentially, it was a suicide mission.
All the other soldiers in my father’s platoon were killed in the crossfire. My father was gravely wounded, but the wounds eventually healed. What did not heal was his sense of survivor guilt.
My father was not alone. New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote “Many veterans feel guilty because they lived while others died. Some feel ashamed because they didn’t bring all their men home and wonder what they could have done differently to save them.”
Memorial Day means remembering. When we remember those who fought and died for our country, we also remember and acknowledge the tremendous psychological price paid by those who made it back. They survived and, hopefully, created meaningful and productive lives, but the injury to their souls persisted as an unavoidable cost of war. This is our world, at least until the utopian vision of the prophet Zechariah is fulfilled--
“The warrior’s bow will be banished, and God will declare peace to the nations.”