I ran into an old neighbor a while back. I asked about everyone on the block and he casually mentioned: “You know Jerry next door passed away?” I didn’t know that and was saddened to hear it, although having died at 93, he’d lived a good long life. He was one of a vanishing breed…a World War II veteran. Not only did he serve with distinction, he was a navigator on a B-17 shot down over Bremen; he spent almost two years in Stalag Luft I as a POW. I mention him in the forward of my novel in fact as one of the inspirations for writing it.
According to the Department of Veterans Affairs, there are less than 390,000 U.S. veterans of the great conflict of the 20th Century, indeed in all human history, still alive today. And they are dying at an ever accelerating rate. In fact, one day soon I’ll most likely open the newspaper and read that the last veteran of the great crusade to rid the world of the scourge of Nazi fascism and Japanese imperialism has passed on. Then they will all be memories. Ghostly images, interviews, memoirs, and video clips. Dickensian shadows from a war that saw over 50 million killed, including 418,000 Americans.
The post-war world in which I’ve grown up and now raise my own children is so different from the one in which Jerry and the 16 million other Americans who wore the uniform from 1941-45 lived that they may as well have been from another planet.
These dying veterans, whose childhoods were hardened by a Great Depression, spent their teens or early twenties hunkered down in foxholes enduring enemy shelling and machine gun fire. They flew 2,000 horsepower fighter planes and swooped down at 300 mph just above the tree-tops to strafe enemy targets. They endured screaming Kamikaze attacks from the decks of battlecruisers. They suffered in the heat and the dust of North Africa and Sicily, and in the steaming jungles of Guadalcanal and Buna. They shivered in the brutal cold of the Ardennes, or anxiously trekked through the terrifying mists of the Hürtgen Forest. They suffered on the burning sulfur of the black sands of Iwo Jima or the sharp coral rocks of Peleliu.
Others fought for weeks in the same rain-soaked uniforms when the ceaseless deluges came down on them in Italy, New Britain, and Okinawa. Some spent their most formative years as POWs enduring brutal privations and maltreatment. They were just kids. And yet they came to know misery, hunger, exhaustion, and primal fear while seeing their friends die violently as they catalogued experiences that none of us who grew up in the Pax Americana they bequeathed as their legacy in the subsequent seven decades could possibly imagine, save our veterans of Korea, Vietnam and the Mideast.
We hear talk today of “safe spaces” and “micro-aggressions.” I wonder what Jerry would have thought of such concepts? One imagines that when at barely old enough to shave you’ve jumped out of a burning bomber into a population of people trying to kill you, the traumatizing results of a disappointing election shrink to insignificance by comparison. (The young ball turret gunner in Jerry’s bomber crew was, in fact, clubbed to death by angry German civilians when his chute landed among them).
I would tell my kids, “You see Mister Jerry there, cutting his lawn? He’s a genuine war hero.” And I think now what lessons men like Jerry have to teach? I think it’s that in order to have a world in which “trigger warnings” are said with a straight face, one has to stand on the shoulders of a generation that came of age in a far more dangerous place. Men who spent their formative years not reciting mindless chants on the college quad while protesting the latest faux outrage in between gender studies classes, but rather in water-logged holes in the ground wondering if they were lying in their graves, or hunched in freezing gun turrets five miles high waiting as the enemy planes lined up for an attack, or on the pitching decks of warships in line of battle as the black dots of the enemy vessels on the horizon flash their guns aimed right at your head. For them a “trigger warning” had far more lethal implications.
I’m not necessarily embarrassed for this generation of coddled children. We made them. We gave them this life of heretofore undreamt of wealth, opportunity, healthcare, creature comforts, technology, mobility, and relative stability. In fact, even a poor American today has a higher standard of living by all measures except the size of their home than did the mightiest kings of old. And we have asked little by way of sacrifice in return for such largesse. In a perverse way, these entitled children chanting the latest indignation du jour on the college campus are the by-product of the victorious struggles of the past. They possess what the author Lee Harris calls “the collective forgetfulness that over time settles over peaceful societies.” All I can say is that if history does have one lesson it is that events are cyclical. If such is the case, I don’t know how we as a people on the whole, outside those extraordinary men and women currently in the armed forces today, might handle the next Pearl Harbor. 9/11 gave us a clue. But it was a fleeting unity of purpose. Today we are more divided, and more sensitive, than any time since Fort Sumter.
We weren’t always. With singular purpose, the USA in the 1940s waged a world war on three continents with young men like Jerry. Citizens who, when called to meet the challenges of Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo, rose to the occasion with vigor. Many paid the bill for today’s peace and prosperity so unappreciated by so many with their lives. Today? I don’t know. I must confess that sometimes I wonder whether those who find the Betsy Ross flag, the symbol of our nation’s fiery birth of freedom, courtesy of other veterans of another war, would ever be willing to fight for, let alone die for, this country. Indeed, what would they fight for at all?
My guess is nothing. I don’t see a lot of Jerrys among them. I’d like to think I’m wrong.
The next bolt from the blue—and there will be one as sure as night follows day—will tell us the answer.
Brad Schaeffer is the author of the WW2 Novel Of Another Time And Place [Post Hill/Simon & Schuster, 2018]