I am not a veteran. I have three brothers, and none is a veteran. We come from a civilian family. But my grandfather served in World War I, and my father in World War II. I know nothing of my grandfather’s service, but, in honor of Veterans’ Day, this is what I know about my father’s experience.
He was a college student in South Dakota when the war broke out, and he finished out the academic year and then enlisted in the Army. In basic training, they gave all the recruits an IQ test. My father’s score was extraordinarily high, so he was diverted into an engineering program for a year or two. Many of the other students in that program were Jews, a group my father had never previously encountered, which likely was the origin of my family’s philosemitism.
In 1944, the Army’s high command decided the war wouldn’t last enough to need a new generation of engineers, so they terminated the program and sent all of the would-be engineers to Europe. When my father got off the boat and was being processed, an officer noticed that his file said that he could type. “Is it true what it says here, that you can type?” “Yeah,” my father said, “I can type.” So on the basis of that humble skill, not his unrealized potential as an engineer, he was assigned to headquarters. (Divisional? Regimental? I don’t know.) It likely saved his life.
One morning in December 1944, he was in a mess tent somewhere in Belgium about to eat breakfast, when a soldier burst into the tent and shouted that the Germans had attacked, they had broken through our lines, they would be here in a matter of hours, and everyone should get to the rear by any means possible. My father fell in with a group of three or four others who started making their way west. One of the group was an officer, i.e., someone who actually knew what he was doing, and my father later said that was why they survived.
They walked west, trying to stay ahead of the Germans. At one point they came to a crossroads where signs pointed in opposite directions. One way went to Malmedy. They randomly chose the other direction. Later that day, the Malmedy Massacre occurred. Turning the other way saved their lives.
My father’s little group continued making its way west for a few days, sleeping in barns and the like, never knowing how far they were ahead of advancing German troops. Finally, they were walking along a dirt or gravel road when they saw a cloud of dust to the west. They kept walking until they met the advancing troops, and then sat down in the ditch to watch.
It was American soldiers, rushed up if I remember correctly from Italy, passing by in hundreds of trucks, one after another. They were, as my father said later, the “real soldiers.” They sat with their legs hanging over the truck beds and rifles cradled across their laps, cigarettes hanging from their mouths, without, apparently, a care in the world. For the first time, my father and his companions knew they were safe.
The other young men with whom my father had studied engineering before they were sent to Europe were not so lucky. Not being able to type, they were mostly on the front lines. Most were captured, killed or wounded in the Battle of the Bulge.
My father was wounded only once during his service, when, in Belgium, he was shaving when a bomb landed nearby and caused him to cut himself. He was no kind of war hero. But, like millions of other young Americans, he served.
He died a year or two ago at age 101. Without any prompting from me or my brothers, the local veterans’ group in his home town in South Dakota turned out at his burial. They fired a salute, played Taps on a bugle, and draped an American flag over his coffin. The day was bitterly cold, and the time it took to fold the flag and present it to my older brother was agonizing. When it was over and the veterans dispersed, I ran after them to thank them for participating in the burial service. My father was very much a civilian, but in the end, his service in the U.S. Army loomed surprisingly large. So it has been for many years with our armed forces, drawn from the citizenry.
So, Happy Veterans’ Day to all who have served.
