Subject: Re: Band of Brothers
From: Cecilia Baader (ceciliabaader@yahoo.com)
Date: Mon Oct 08 2001 - 16:40:21 GMT
--- Scottie Bowman wrote:
"...If you asked Salinger ‘what it was like’ in the Hurtgen Forest I
suspect he would give you the same wry, impotent smile that old
soldiers have given me when I asked them the same question & they
explained gently that ‘you probably had to be there.’"
My Uncle Max was with the 83rd Airborne. (For those of you who don't
know, those would be the guys who parachuted their way onto the shores
of Normandy on D-Day. Something like only one in four of them survived
the bloody beaches of Normandy.)
So. Uncle Max was wounded. Badly. He was never never never the same,
my grandmother would cluck. When he was a boy, she'd say, he was sweet,
talkative. Those are the last words I'd use to describe the man I
knew.
After his wife threw him out, he lived with my grandparents. When I was
a kid, sometimes I'd wander back into his room (it always smelled like
spices) to find him stretched out on the bed listening to Beethoven,
Mozart, Chopin. He'd sit up and explain that these are the only
enduring things, the only things worth knowing. And then he'd tell me
stories. Mostly about his years of travel, like his meeting with the
Pope, or when he gave directions to stupid Americans in St. Petersburg
with a fake Russian accent, or the time that he first saw the Pyramids.
But then one day, he told me about Normandy.
"I fell out of the sky," he said. He was stretched out on his bed
listening to Wagner.
I caught my breath. "How did you live?"
"It was a miracle." He laughed, his arms folded behind his head and
eyes tightly closed. "But then, there was no escaping. Germans to the
left of me, Germans to the right. Germans in front and Germans behind."
"What did you do?"
"Why, I died," he said, and shooed me out.
It was many many years before I understood that he was telling the
truth.
Regards,
Cecilia.
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