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Events of 50 years ago return with clarity
By Carl Heintze
War has its latent wounds, injuries that appear years after the conflict is over. The Gulf War syndrome is an example. So is post-traumatic stress syndrome, a legacy of the Vietnam conflict. My own wound is much older, but it is no less real, alas. It is to remember with increasing clarity the events of more than half a century ago. Most of them took place either along the border or inside Germany, the land of my ancestors.
Some are frightening, but most are not. Today, they have become tinged with nostalgia--events now so well learned I wonder sometimes if they ever really happened.
I wonder at why this is so, as I have wondered through this past half century. Was it perhaps because I was young? ("Life to be sure is nothing much to lose, but we were young," as the poet A.E. Houseman once wrote.)
Was it because danger made them more intense, more likely to burn themselves into our memories? No other experiences have for many of us come to equal them. Although we have married, borne children, worked, traveled, been exalted and depressed, none of these events in our lives have left the same kind of impression.
The most terrible part about these memories, now so long ago and yet so fresh, is that they grew out of the worst of man's vices, his willingness to kill his fellow man.
For war is the last resort of humanity, the road men (and now women) take when there seems to be no other solution. War excepts the individual from responsibility, even as it absorbs his will. It is an act of faith, but seldom for a cause which deserves such faith. It brings out both the best and the worst in its participants, those who would do anything to preserve themselves and those who are willing to give their lives so that others may live.
War is a combination of fear, fatigue, testing of endurance, the deepest sleep and the most choking fear. It is life lived on the edge, and sometimes it also is death--death of friends, death of one's soul, death of a nation. Its end is a blessing, yet it never ends for those who took part in it at its deepest core.
For all these reasons I wish, but I know I will never be able to forget those memories of days lived in 1944 and 1945. I see again the young Scots paratrooper who greeted us as we landed in Gurock; the sight of our first dead soldier in the waters off Omaha Beach; the drunken soldier in the replacement depot near LeMans, seeking to avoid movement to the front; the sound of a thousand bombers overhead flying toward Cologne; the first snow of the winter of 1944--almost, as a Californian, my first snow; frozen roads and the crackling sound of artillery fire in the Battle of the Bulge; the rain, cold, darkness and despair of the Huertgen Forest; walking across the bridge at Remagen before it fell; the endless lines of tanks, trucks, halftracks and armored cars heading east of the Rhine, vehicles bumper to bumper on every road; the mountains of the Westerwald; the plains of Prussia; and at last the ruins of Dessau, a city filled with rubble, with stalled streetcars, with foxholes on its east and west edges. The war had squeezed what was left of unoccupied Germany into this space.
There are more, but it is useless to write them down. By doing so, they will not disappear from my memory, nor from the memory of all those veterans who remain alive after all these years. For I know I am not the only one afflicted. We meet sometimes in the sudden unity of memory, recalling events we shared which others never knew or have forgotten and we are once again young, committed, soon to be the victors.
But the victors of what?
Certainly not of ourselves, perhaps not even of the peace which followed the war. We must have pushed hard enough on the hinge of fate, so that the world changed when we were done, but "our" war was followed by the senselessness of the Cold War, by the tragedy of Vietnam, by the Gulf War, by all those smaller conflicts which have sprung up since.
Our victory was not to end war as an instrument of national policy, that much is certain. If not that, then, what did it accomplish?
Even now, half a century later, I pause to wonder. We were not shriven of memories. Though we returned home to begin new lives, we were different persons, and we will carry with us to our graves the unceasing, haunting remembrance of what we were, what we might have been, what we are today.
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Sunnyvale, California Since 1994
