Memorial Day
As the snow melted down the mountains, following his infantry on route to freedom and liberation, he knew he’d be eternally living in a precious history. He was fortunate to meet survival. His final breath wasn’t back on that mountain, lying on the frozen ground that felt like steel. He endured the spree of bullets that ripped through the labyrinth of wood, creating an avalanche of bark, snow and shattered ice. The costly price of death would remain with him, though.
The war stole his youth, yet his entire life waited for him back in America. When he returned to the school, he sat in the last row of desks. He watched a woman in all black, bearing a cross around her neck scribble white chalk across the board. The classroom felt more like a funeral than an education. Each night when he’d lie under the comfort of his white sheets, he discovered relief and not the snowy forest floor—where his sheets used to camouflage him from the enemy. Before work, he’d put on a brown leather jacket free of bullet holes. He endured the stories and the memories of the Bulge. Those routine functions, tiny bits of humility were everyday memorials for the fallen men of his infantry.
He didn’t smile much over the next seven decades. Nor did he ever want to travel back to the forest or the camps–where, from his infantry’s sacrifice, hundreds of prisoners of tyranny were freed. Cees Nooteboom wrote, “The traveler always wants to find out how the past relates to his own present.” My grandfather lived the arduous, terrifying past.
Nooteboom continued, “He (the traveler) loves to know where he is, and without history we are nowhere.” My grandfather understood how vital the chaos in the Ardennes was the success of the Allied Troops. He wrote history with each breath of survival in the forest. More words and paragraphs lined the notes of history as he marched to his boy home country of Italy. He was a dual citizen of America and Italy. He proudly wore the American flag stitched to his uniform. But he knew once he left Italy and the entire 1945 European campaign, that he would never return.
History is mainly accounts of war with brief periods of peace within the sentences of history books. My grandfather’s accounts of World War II are no exception. Within his brief moments of peace, my grandfather lived with the pain of being too familiar with history. Yet, through his pain, and the ultimate sacrifice of the men who didn’t return home Europe, we will learn and remember.