The Willow Glen Resident

Point of View

Carl Heintze

Learning that life's lease is brief-but full

Lately I've been thinking about mortality. My mortality, that is. Maybe it's age, maybe it's El Niño. El Niño gets blamed for everything these days, and what's left over gets blamed on Saddam Hussein.

Anyway, I've been thinking about the first time it suddenly came to me that my life might someday end. It was twilight time in late October 1944, and I was ambling about in a small woods on the German-Belgian border.

It was a time between battles, when the push to the German border had concluded and the Battle of the Bulge had not yet begun. We could walk about with impunity in the evening--if not in the daytime--because before us there ran off into the distance a couple miles of open fields full of abandoned crops. The enemy, such as it was, lay beyond that.

We were new to the territory, and I was fairly new to infantry combat. I knew one end of a rifle from another but not a whole lot more. In fact, I did not even have my rifle with me--definitely, I learned later, not a good thing to do.

I walked up to the edge of the woods in the dusk and looked out across the fields toward the next low row of hills, now indistinct in the gathering darkness. For reasons I am not sure about but which I now attribute to some higher power, I stopped.

I stood looking across the fields for a moment, and then I lifted my foot and prepared to walk out beyond the edge of the woods into the open field. As I did, I paused and looked down.

And then I drew in my breath and held it for a long time and stood frozen, one foot in the air. Finally, I carefully lowered it to the ground.

Strapped to the tree nearest me--a matter of about two feet--was an American hand grenade, and attached to the hand grenade was a trip wire that ran across the edge of the woods to another tree 10 feet away.

It had been put there by the unit that we relieved, but they had never told us about it.

Life has never been quite the same for me since that time, because in that instant I realized not only that I had a finite time on the Earth, but that there were people about who didn't really care whether I lived or died.

In fact, there were some--not the ones who had wired up the grenade but others across the fields--who were actively trying to end my life.

Of course that was a long time ago, more than 50 years. Obviously I did not finish myself off by tripping the grenade.

And despite another seven months of tramping around Germany and Belgium with a rifle on my shoulder, no one else finished me off.

But that evening has stuck in my mind. I can see that woods and those fields almost as clearly as I saw them that night. I can see the grenade and the wire quite clearly, too. Now and then when I think of that night, I wonder why I didn't take one last step.

And I have to say I don't know. What I do know is that I came back from the war to marry and father kids, to be a grandfather, to laugh, love, be depressed, filled, empty, hungry, full, occasionally elated and now and then absolutely euphoric. In time, I've come to see none of these emotions were unique to me--although I thought each of them was at the time.

But I've also come to appreciate all the things that happened after that evening; indeed, all the things that happened to me for the rest of my life, because I had suddenly been shown that I was privileged to experience them.

Maybe that appreciation is what mortality is about. Maybe mortality is knowing that the lease we hold on life is brief, but it also is quite full.

Or it should be. I know this sounds Pollyanna-ish (if I may coin a lousy cliché), and not everyone gets to enjoy their mortality for long.

There were, for instance, millions of other young men in that year who did not look down before they figuratively tripped the wire and for whom life was all too short. But that also seems to bring some meaning to my mortality, too.

Someone, something, did not want me to trip the wire. Something, someone, wanted me to live--and to write this to you.

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