From the March/April 2015 issue of Sporting Classics.
The Coleman lantern roared softly, like a crowd in the distance. Trees full of cicadas cast moon shadows on the water. The thumping bass of a bullfrog punctuated the rhythmic static of the cicadas. As the night wore on, cold water from the creek at the end of the cove created a low fog that advanced across the lake—wisps rose and twisted and looked like spirits with someplace to go.
Just like so many other nights, something about evenings triggered his memories that even then had been bottled for decades—memories from the Battle of the Bulge, which he rarely called by name. Parts of the stories I’d heard before, but he added new detail with each retelling.
“I still remember the cold,” he started, speaking just above the hum of the night noises. He had a gravelly voice, deep and suited for late-night stories.
“Our sergeant used to make us switch to dry socks at night. We’d take a dry pair from inside our shirts and put them on. Then we’d put the cold, wet socks inside our shirts. By the next night, our body heat would have dried them and we’d switch again. This kept us from having foot trouble, but the last thing you’d want on a cold night is to put a pair of icy, wet socks inside your shirt. The guys who wouldn’t do it . . . They got frostbite.”
“Not one of them came back. So I got put in with a new unit.”
Some nights, if he stopped talking, I’d nudge him with questions. Other nights, I didn’t have to. He just needed someone who would listen.
“I think I spent one night in a foxhole with a German. Our lines were confused. I had enemy foxholes behind me, in front of me, all around. We had caught a German in an American uniform that morning in our breakfast line. The officers told us they’d been sent in to infiltrate and create confusion.
“So right at dark a guy jumps in my foxhole. I spoke to him, and he wouldn’t answer. Wouldn’t say a word. I doubt he spoke English. Anyway, I didn’t sleep much that night, and the next morning he was gone.”
Just after midnight, it seemed like the fish took a siesta, so we checked our baits. With the lanterns growing dim, their roar seemed even more distant. We pumped them up, and the instantly brighter light and heightened rumble fed a bit more life into us—even if the bait hung limp.
“It was just after the Bulge that I joined another unit. I was standing guard duty one night, and as I looked into the darkness I saw this white bullet. It was coming at my forehead in slow motion. So I watched it come, and when it got to me I just moved my head to the side and let it go by.
“Well, the sarge came by later and asked me what I’d seen, so I told him about the bullet. He said it sounded like battle fatigue.
“They were planning a night mission, and when they got ready to go, he said, ‘Mize, I’m giving you the night off.’ So they went without me. Not one of them came back. So I got put in with a new unit.”
His stories often ended with painful but unspoken speculation and silent questioning: There’s no telling what happened to them, but why was I spared? I’d just sit and wait, often leaning over the gunwale to watch shad swim laps beneath the lantern.
At the edge of the darkness, I could hear the soft pop of bluegills taking mayflies off the water, smacking their lips as they sucked down the insects. Occasionally, the mayflies flew to refuge on the side of the boat, their fresh creamy wings extended full length as if drying by lantern light.
“Why did you join?” I asked.
“My best friend was going in, and I wanted to go with him. I was only seventeen so I lied about my age. I was five feet and four inches tall and weighed a hundred and four pounds dripping wet. But they took me and wanted me to be a paratrooper because I was so light—offered me fifteen bucks a month extra if I’d do it, but I didn’t want to jump out of airplanes.
“So I got to basic training, and it was the first time I remember getting three meals a day. Even with the training I gained ten pounds during basic.
“That night we got shelled, and I heard one coming straight at me. I figured I was a goner.”
“When I got out of basic, I was in the army infantry and was given a mortar. You know that thing weighed about half what I did? You’d think they could have found me something lighter. That plus my pack weighed about as much as I did.
“Then they put me on a ship headed for England. I liked the big cities. Never seen anything like them. Went out of New York and was shipped to London. Everywhere we went, the Brits were glad to see us. I met a girl in London and asked her to go to a movie. She said she had a boyfriend, but she’d bring somebody so we could double-date. She brought her mom.”
He laughed so hard small ripples emanated from the boat. He had a laugh that made you join in, and when he laughed really hard, he’d wheeze like that bear in the cartoons.
“I didn’t care. I took her mom to the movie anyway. We knew we wouldn’t see a lot of girls after London so we went out whenever we could. I went out with one girl so tall I had to stand on a box to kiss her goodnight.
“I liked the Brits. Even served under General Montgomery for a while. The nice thing about Monty is that all his troops got a daily ration of brandy.”
I asked him about the close calls.
“The worst one before I got hit was in France. I was in the best foxhole I had the whole war. We were following behind other troops, so I got a foxhole that had already been dug and had a sheet of tin over it. Rain or snow, I knew I’d stay dry. It was in the middle of an orchard, so I had apple trees all around me.
“We’d been in combat by then, and I learned early on to judge the whine of a shell—if it’s heading your way, you know it. That night we got shelled, and I heard one coming straight at me. I figured I was a goner. It kept coming, and the whine got louder until it hit. I braced expecting a big explosion, but nothing happened.
“The next morning the sky was the bluest I’d ever seen. When I got out of my hole, I looked, and the shell was wedged in the fork of an apple tree not fifteen feet away. I don’t know if it was a dud or if splinters wedged around the pin, but it didn’t blow up. If it had, it would have taken me with it. Somebody must have been looking out for me.”
As long as he talked, time kept moving. We’d break the conversation to point out a bite on one of the rods or to grab one and bring in a fish.
During those years we fished at night only on occasion and almost always for trout, which could bite so delicately that the line would quiver without bouncing the rod tip. Sometimes, if Dad’s mood and the weather were right, we’d try to catch a mess of crappie, spending the night tied up under a bridge or against a rock cliff that would reflect our shadows in the lantern light. Fishing must have been his favorite thing back then, because he never rushed to leave—neither did I.
I’d usually not ask him about the day he got hit, but eventually he’d come to it.
“You know, I always blamed my wounds on losing my first sergeant. He knew better than to hole up in a barn. We were almost in sight of the Rhine River and the war would end before long, but this green lieutenant ordered us into the barn to get out of the weather. He hadn’t learned that every building was a target. So when the shell hit the barn, fragments went everywhere. Hit my side and my leg.
“They amputated part of my leg in the field but gangrene set in. When I got to a hospital, they had to amputate more. I don’t think they expected me to make it. One doctor left his address on my night stand and told me to let him know if I lived. I lost his address when they moved me, but I figure I outlasted them all.”
When we buried Dad, we did it just as he asked, with military honors. The video display at the funeral home rolled through photos of the family and 82 years of a life that seemed to go as quickly as the snapshots. Whenever a photo showed him standing by a cooler of fish or holding up a nice one, his grin ran ear to ear.
I knew of sharing a foxhole with a German, or a British girl so tall that a short young boy from Virginia had to stand on a box to kiss her.
Now I’m one of the few people left who’ve heard these history lessons by lantern light. Whenever I’d tell my friends some of these tales, they’d say I need to write them down, but I feared I couldn’t do them justice. How can you put on a page those lessons passed along in the still of the night when so many of the important words went unspoken? How do you fill in the blanks 50 years later?
One night he and I watched a documentary on the Battle of the Bulge. At one point, I looked over and noticed the stump of his amputated leg was twitching and he had leaned forward ever so slightly, looking at the faces of the soldiers, looking for his buddies—looking for himself. He wanted answers to the questions that had been plaguing him since those cold days in Western Europe. Where did they go? Why am I still here? He was still trying to fill in the blanks.
Just before he died, the Veteran’s Administration sent out word they were looking for surviving WWII veterans and inviting them to the commemoration of the World War II Memorial. Dad sent them his address.
Not long afterward, he received a package—a box of medals for campaigns in France and the Battle of the Bulge, and a Purple Heart. With transfers through multiple hospitals, the VA had lost track of him.
I like to think that box of medals allowed him to pass with at least some understanding of why he had been spared. After seeing the wonders and horrors of the world, he probably felt a sense of purpose. Having dropped out of school in the fifth grade, he came home from service, earned a GED and machinist certification, then raised three kids and sent them to college. Perhaps that sense of purpose was to create a quality of life for his children that he wasn’t born into. And that box of medals was his personal war memorial—his and the men he served with. Maybe for him, it all made sense finally. At least, their sacrifices were honored.
For me, when I went through school, studies of World War II meant something different than for most everyone else. My classmates learned of maps with arrows or pictures of cities reduced to rubble. I knew of sharing a foxhole with a German, or a British girl so tall that a short young boy from Virginia had to stand on a box to kiss her. I knew of cold socks inside a shirt at the Battle of the Bulge, an unexploded shell in an apple orchard, the white bullet that saved my dad’s life.
History for me was an image of a shivering young boy who looked like a hungrier, earlier version of me, too far from home in a world of chaos.
All history should be taught by lantern light. +++
Jim Mize has just completed a collection of humor for fly fishermen titled, A Creek Trickles Through It. For more information on this and his other books, go to ACreekTricklesThroughIt.com.
Cover image: Jim Mize