Four World War II Veterans at Home Again

  

My uncle John came home from World War II a damaged man.

Physically, he was intact, but mentally and emotionally he was not. His unit of green troops had been over-run by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge in the Ardennes Forest.

When Germans over-run you there is very little left. The Bosch scoffed at American soldiers, saying they played at war.

Today, we call what Uncle John had post traumatic stress disorder. In his time, it was known as battle fatigue, the thousand-mile stare. It manifests itself in various ways and at various times over a life.

It never really goes away.

And it lasts longer than a lifetime, because the madness is passed it on from generation to generation.

It ruins marriages, families and friendships.

When I was five years old in 1953 Uncle John visited our house visibly upset. He came to talk to his older sister, my mother, about a delusion he believed was real.

Sweating, shaking, red in the face and with his knees nearly buckling he began describing what he had witnessed between a man and a boy in the woods.

“Kids, go to your rooms,” my mother instructed us.

We scurried up the stairs without hesitation. We loved our Uncle John and looked forward to his visits. He he made us laugh and brought us chocolates, so we really did not want to go.

We compromised between our need for obedience to our mother and our desire to stay close to Uncle John by flopping down on the hardwood floor at the top of the stairs.

We could not be seen there but could hear him talk.

“There was a man in the woods with a boy over his knee. He had the boy’s pants down and was spanking him with a heavy leather belt and cutting him with a knife. He just went on and on hitting him with the belt and cutting him with the knife while the boy screamed and begged him to stop.”

“John, no. You know that was not real.”

“It was. I saw him doing it.”

“It was just in you mind. Can’t you understand that? Or maybe you dreamed it.”

“I wasn’t asleep. I can take you there into the woods and show you. There is this man cutting and spanking a boy with a knife and a belt.”

Why my mother didn’t ask the obvious, that is, why Uncle John didn’t stop him, I don’t know.

Perhaps she was too upset by what she was seeing and hearing from her brother.

My mother eventually called the cops. I don’t remember much of what happened after that, but the police were very understanding of the situation, most likely knowing what they were dealing with.

They had Uncle John take them into the woods, where they found nothing.

There is an old joke that says I’m not crazy but I’m a carrier. My uncle was both crazy at times and a carrier.

I don’t know if my big sister listened to the conversation or not, but I did.

It was enough to implant his awful image in my mind.

As a boy, I thought it was as real as the sun rising in the morning or my father’s smile.

At that age, and often into our later years, we take what adults say as gospel.

I had nightmares about that man beating and carving up that boy’s bottom. In my nightmare that boy was me, just as in his hallucination my uncle must have thought he was back in the Ardennes being butchered by Germans.

In a way, both my uncle and me were victims, all courtesy of the Battle of the Bulge. Thank you, Adolph Hitler.

As the years pressed on, I understood my nightmares for what they were. They were what my mother understood them to be when she first heard Uncle John’s feverish tale: they were all in my head.

It was a feverish fantasy brought on by the immense trauma of war, butchery, dread and death, brought back home from the Ardennes Forest.

*

The Battle of the Bulge had been a tragedy that my uncle had participated in and suffered terribly from. It was logical that that reality would be seared into his consciousness and color the contents of his mind, then mine.

Horror was real to him, it had to be for him to survive. His mind was trained to see destruction and death and avoid them, but his mind also wished to eject them.

He could do that only when his memories were transformed and talked about, given the devilish pathways that had been established in his brain by war.

Uncle John recovered enough to live a normal life. My father, who was a contractor, hired him. Hard work was good for him physically and mentally and emotionally.

Education helped. He graduated from Villanova University with a degree in accounting.

Fiddling with dry numbers was a clean and honorable way to think and demanded discipline. He married and had children, embarking on a normal life, but his demons remained in certain ways.

It almost sounds comic to say it but in reality it was very sad: he ate a gallon of vanilla ice cream every night before bed, always one gallon and always vanilla. He weighed over three hundred pounds.

Maybe the ice cream cooled the hot night terrors and kept away the demons of memory.

*

Veterans of World War II were everywhere in my youth.

So many had fought and been sickened in the mind by the experience. Whenever I encountered one, I thought of what my Uncle John had gone through and how it affected him. I looked at them with the insights my uncle’s visit had conferred on me.

Some were in worse condition than he was, others were much better.

It made me a pacifist for life.

I hated the Vietnam War, partly because I knew its distant horrors and futilities would last in us forever, that crazed veterans would come home and years later relate stories to their sisters that would drive their children half-mad with fear.

My boyish nightmares had stopped.

Growing up crumbles all fantasies. I saw how my uncle had recovered. I tried to see the good in other old soldiers who had endured such things.

My very minor case of PTSD, caught like a head cold and brought on by my uncle’s tale when I was five years old was vanquished by growing up.

I saw the good I saw in him in his later years, but I remembered his story and what it meant for others.

*

Irv, Charlie and Bob were three World War II veterans I served when I tended bar at The Lambertville House.

In a way, I knew them before I met them.

 “Give me a drink, Carl.”

“The usual?”

“The usual.”

They were disinclined to talk about the war.

I knew better from my upbringing than to ask.

I did not have the ghoulish delight in hearing tales of horror that some who had not been to war relish.

But I couldn’t help but observe their lives as growing twisted out of the war, as works of recovery in progress, for I knew living a good life and forgetfulness were balms if not cures and were necessary.

Each of these men took the chance to move on toward normality, living the kind of life they would have had they never gone to war.

We’re going to the movies of the mind now.

The Lambertville House, with its dark wooden bar and smoke-filled old-time ambience, was a perfect oasis for my three friends.

It was like something out of Casablanca, the World War II flick starring Humphrey Bogart and Igmar Bergman, but playing out years after the war, when Irv, Charlie and Bob came around.

Each visited me to drink, see each other, make jokes and forget.

I tried to be a good bartender and help them along with these things, the drinking and joking and music. Each had the survivor’s delight in the ability to simply be. They reveled in it.

I knew when I saw them light up in the presence of each other that their companionship, their bonds, had been forged in a lifetime of mutual relief. For them, the war was over when they saw each other in the Lambertville House.

Their survival proved it.

“Give my friend here a drink, Joe.”

“Yes, sir, Mister Rick.”

Bob was a leader of the group. He led by music, like Sam the piano man in the movie.

He was a fine musician who worked playing swing-jazz piano in the bar at night, recreating the good times of their wartime youth, which helped to erase the bad.

A man of average size, slightly hunched over, Bob had the biggest smile I have ever seen and a voice made gruff and deep by cigarettes and scotch that he put to good use singing the romantic melodies soldiers listened to during World War II.

His playing and voice revived the visions of pin-up girls and home, the sweetness of civilian life that going to war had taken from them.

“You must remember this …”

Bob socialized with everyone, whether he knew them or not, or had been in the war or not, when he took breaks from playing.

He always had that huge smile and a cigarette and a scotch as played and socialized.

For some reason, perhaps because I was in awe of him, I was a little tongue-tied around him. He would have hated to know that, for he was very comfortable with himself. He liked what he had become, and so did everybody else.

*

Irv was quieter, thinner and taller than most, the pleasant wounded vet who sat alone and seemed very kind.

He perched on the same end stool at the bar whenever he could, and had a dramatic shock of black hair that gave him the looks of an old movie star. He listened to Bob’s music, smiling at the memories, and got misty-eyed and sad.

He had trouble speaking at times. I found out why when he opened up to me one night.

Somehow the subject of how he had been wounded came up.

“I caught a fifty-millimeter shell in the chest from a Messerschmitt flying over to strafe us as we marching along a road,” he said. “Those are big shells and it should have killed me, but I was holding my rifle in front of me as we marched and it hit the wooden stock of my rifle and knocked me over. It sent fragments of wood and metal into my lungs and chest, but holding my rifle that way saved me. It took me years to recover. I still have some trouble breathing.”

He was bony almost to the point of ill health, and mostly he sat there with a drink and a smile, his ears attuned to Bob playing those old songs he loved.

“… a kiss is just a kiss …”

*

Charlie was not quite so happy.

He was the brooding Humphrey Bogart character of the bar, the man almost unable to forget loss.

When he saw Bob and Irv he lit up with a smile as they did with him, but there was a darkness in him that I believed the war had clawed into him and left permanent scars.

To my eyes, he seemed to have every reason to recover, but he had difficulty in doing so.

He married a beautiful woman, Mary, who as a yoga instructor was as fit, caring, healthy and spiritual as a woman could be.

Married to a vet with PTSD she would have to be all those things.

I did not know what Charlie did for a living, but he always wore a suit and tie and seemed to make a good living. He had the same movie-star shock of black hair that Irv did, but he seemed to squirm with discomfort at times just sitting there at the bar in Lambertville’s Casablanca.

He, too, opened up to me, but just once.

“I don’t know what it is. I can’t seem to be happy.”

As a bartender who gave advice when asked, I made a thoughtless, foolish mistake.

I loved traveling to Europe.

To me, it was one great continent of new experiences, pleasures and escape from the insanity of America in the 1970s. I thought it might be for Charlie, too. He had opened up the subject, but I was certainly not one qualified to advise him.

I did not realize that.

“Travel a little,” I said. “Have a good time. Go to Europe.”

He looked at me like I was crazy. He waved me off.

“I’ve done all that already,” he said. “I don’t enjoy those things anymore.”

If I had been more insightful I would have realized his Europe of exploding shells and whizzing bullets was wrong as a suggested travel destination.

His experiences there as a young man were completely the opposite from mine.

He turned to the side on his barstool, away from looking at me. I went on making drinks.

*

I don’t know what became of Irv, Charlie and Bob.

Those days working as a bartender at the Lambertville House were forty years ago.

I think they must have lived out their lives well, as they seemed to when I served drinks to them and I imagined their fears and pains and joys.

I remember hearing that Bob had died, and felt very sorry for it. I feel the same for Charlie and Irv.

Let me buy you a virtual drink, boys.

They say the real pacifists are those who have seen combat.

In a way, I became one of them by learning from my Uncle John.