The Willow Glen Resident

Point of View

Carl Heintze

This buddy won't soon be forgotten

It's hard to explain to anyone who wasn't in World War II exactly what a buddy was. He was something more than a friend and certainly someone less than a lover. Buddies, or at least my buddy, would have been shocked to think there were any homosexual connotations in the term.

A buddy was someone with whom you were paired, usually by circumstance but occasionally by choice, someone to whom you remained attached as long as you were in the war and sometimes long afterward.

That's the way it was with Don and me. As circumstances would have it, we were assigned to the same squad and the same platoon of our infantry rifle company in Belgium in October 1944. We seemed to have little in common except that we both had had our college educations interrupted by the war. But there similarities ended.

Don was from a small town in Illinois. I was from a small town in California. He had no brothers or sisters. I had a sister. He was tall and gangly with a loud, distinct voice. I ran to fat and mumbled. He loved dogs and raised dachshunds as a hobby. I wasn't much for pets.

I wrote bad poetry. He didn't. But somehow we got along with one another better than anyone else in the squad or the platoon. When it came time to dig foxholes, we dug ours together. We stood guard in the same shift, we were next to one another when we fell in for formation. We talked to one another a lot.

It was the talk that made the difference. In that vast body of impersonal cruelty called the Army, he was the only one who seemed to care what happened to me. I guess I must have meant something of the same to him. When I was wounded, he was at my side to help.

There was one singular difference between us, however.

Don was a leader. It came to him naturally. Men years older looked up to and depended on him. He was the kind of man who, as the saying goes, you would follow anywhere. Moreover, he seemed to accept this without really being aware of it.

In short order, he became a squad leader and was promoted to sergeant. Then one day he led his squad on a dangerous patrol through and around the enemy lines and returned successfully.

The company and battalion commanders were impressed. He was recommended for a battlefield commission as an officer.

But before that could happen, however, not long before the war ended, he was so badly wounded he was sent back to the United States. His commission caught up with him in the hospital and he accepted it, returned to Germany for a tour of duty, came home, finished college, got his master's and Ph.D. degrees and began to teach college political science courses.

But as an officer, he remained in the Army Reserve, and when the Korean War came, he was recalled to active duty, spent a year in Korea and then came back to Illinois.

His time in Korea seemed a turning point in his life. His mother, whom he revered, died, and then so did his father. Eventually he built himself a little house on the Mississippi, where he could spend the summers.

For a short time, he was an assistant to his local congressman in Washington, but he really wasn't interested in politics. He traveled a lot. He drank a fair amount. He never married. Indeed, as far as I know, he never went out on a date and never contemplated marriage. He also seemed to have no particular interest in his own sex. He remained, although not without friends, a loner.

Through all this we kept in touch, usually by letter, but once or twice through personal visits.

Then one Christmas I got a card from him saying he had been diagnosed with cancer. I never heard from him again, but a year or two later a fellow faculty member wrote to tell me that he had died. He was 59.

He had no one to leave anything to except his university, and that's what he did. His papers are in the university library. What's left of him is preserved in them--and in my memory.

For as with all special friends, his passing left a hole in my life, a hole that's never really been filled. Though years have passed, in a vague way I still miss him.

Sometimes I still hear his big voice--a little harsh, firm, the voice of a leader, telling me what to do. And the truth is, I know that whatever he's saying is right because that's the way it was when we were buddies.

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