A MEMOIR OF WAR, RUSSIA, AND DISCOVERY

Normandy - June 6, 1944

I'm a scout for my antiaircraft artillery battery, so I have to wait for the infantry to get inland before I can find and stake out our position. I'm not about to go in ahead of the infantry.

As I start to dig a new foxhole, I hear a thundering blast and realize that the engineers may finally have blown up that huge concrete barrier which has prevented any of our armor or trucks from going up the beach exit road. Now, looking through rising dust, I see they've succeeded. Barrier's gone! We may soon be off "Omaha Dog Green." It's 5:00 p.m.

Suddenly I hear a sharp explosion just in front of me.

Head snaps back as if hit by sledgehammer, and curtain of warm blood pours over forehead, closing eyes. Whole body shivers into shock. My God, what's happened? Loud ringing sound in head, feel unsteady.

Not knowing whether I'll last another minute, find myself, ever so slowly, like an automaton, raising right arm, touching right hand to gaping hole in helmet. Feeling past sharp metal curls, fingers continue downward, through remnants of hair, to touch soft, wet surface of brains.

Still moving at half speed, do same thing with left hand. Incredibly, both hands fit together through helmet as fingers explore warm mush inside skull.

Why can I think? How long will I breathe? Sweep blood from eyes, using fingers like windshield wipers, and peer through thick dust of mortars exploding all around. There, in nearby foxholes, are Lieutenants Knollman and Phillips, two other scouts from our battalion. They stare back at me aghast, and I can see my impending death reflected in their widening eyes. I'm a red statue, about to fall. I try to speak to Knollman, but no words come out. I expect to die in a matter of minutes, maybe seconds.

But then, as seconds become minutes, I fail to die. Instead, I feel a surge of determination to live. Body shivering slows. Hands return to helmet, and I find it will not come off. Those metal curls must have turned inward, clamping helmet into scalp. Open first aid kit mounted on belt, take out sulfa powder and pour it into hole. Then gently stuff all the kit's gauze bandaging down in there.

Strangely, feel no pain; must be shock. Yet continue to bleed profusely, realize I may soon faint. So find pressure points by ears, press them about two minutes. Slows bleeding. Try speak to Knollman again, and now words come out, but they....are.... at....half....speed; sound like a run-down turntable.

As all this is happening, there are the first signs of movement off the beach. I see all those prairie dogs getting up out of their foxholes and heading toward the now open road that leads up to the little town of Vierville.

What is left of our armored cars forms a protective vanguard for the infantry as they head inland. I want to walk, follow them, but I can barely stand. It would be safer in Vierville or even below the bluff, since German mortars, with high, arching trajectories, can't hit down there. Knollman and Phillips follow after the infantry, saying they'll send medics back for me--if they find any. That seems unlikely since we saw the only boatload of medics and ambulances blown to smithereens about noon.

Now I'm alone and feel increasingly faint. Fearing I'll pass out and be left exposed to more mortar fire, I begin to despair. There are at least ten others wounded and dying within sight of me--and hundreds of dead all around.

Then out of nowhere, a brisk, stocky British communications captain bends over me and says his men will move me inland. I'd seen his equipment hit by an 88 in mid-afternoon, soon after it landed. Now he has the presence of mind to put his outfit to some use: moving us to shelter below the bluff. His men leave me nestled in the sand, behind some rocks, with other wounded from the 116^th Infantry Regiment of the 29th Division, the troops we'd landed with this morning at 9:00 a.m. God bless the British! They're better soldiers than we are.

Lying here at the base of the bluff, only 100 feet below a German-occupied pillbox, I'm huddled with six wounded enlisted men, sharing a blanket with one of them, Jake Levy from Brooklyn. Nineteen years old, he's not badly wounded, but in a bitching mood. "Old enough to fight but not old enough to vote," he says. To our right is a corporal, age twenty-one like myself, whose wound is awful: huge hole in hip. David Bennett from Philadelphia. He's in dreadful pain, starts moaning steadily. Don't know what to say to him because I think he's dying; not sure whether I'm going to make it myself. Drifting in a haze, still feeling no pain; tired, but don't want to fade. What happens when the heart can't find enough blood to pump, starts to suck, run dry? How much blood do I need to stay alive? My shirt and pants are drenched in it, caked solid.

It's almost 8:00 p.m., been up 15 hours now; sleepy--sinking--fainting. My head begins to whirl, body starts slipping down into a dark tunnel. What has brought me to this particular place, at this particular time, to die a lonely death, with no final word of consolation? My eyes close; pitch black in here. Am I still alive or observing myself from just beyond? I seem to be entering a strange dimension of time:

Fall of 1937 - Leave Mamaroneck Junior High, go to Exeter. Hard work, no excuses here, love it; keep journal daily. Not only a diary but ideas about religion and life.

Summer of 1940 - I'm in Plainfield, Vermont with "The Experiment in International Living." Mornings we study languages, read books. German first month, then Russian. Read Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. Decide I'm Alyosha. Afternoons we dig new septic system for Goddard College.

September 1940 - Enter Dartmouth, join just about everything at the college: Outing Club, Jack-O-Lantern humor magazine, The Dartmouth newspaper, German Club, Dartmouth Christian Union.

In the Christian Union I meet two seniors majoring in philosophy. One is studying Nikolai Berdyaev, an exiled Russian religious philosopher now living in Paris. He loans me Berdyaev's book The Origin and Meaning of Russian Communism. It's about the anti-religious 19th century Russian intelligentsia and some religious Russian thinkers who opposed them: the Slavophiles led by Ivan Kireevsky and Alexei Khomyakov. It's also about Russian philosophy and Russia's leading religious philosopher, Vladimir Solovyov, a friend of Dostoevsky. Solovyov's known as a "mystic" because he had visionary experiences. Have long conversations with this senior about Solovyov and Russian philosophy. Think I too might major in philosophy, go to graduate school, teach about Berdyaev and Solovyov, as he plans to.

The other senior likes these Russians too but is more interested in Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, a German social philosopher now at Dartmouth. He left Germany when Hitler took power in 1933. Senior suggests I try to audit professor Huessy's course, "The Cross of Reality." I do; blows my mind. This man speaks from his heart, as a believing Christian. Credible because of his own story. Fought in the German army at Verdun. After the war mixed teaching with founding volunteer service camps.

Huessy says man is crucified in a "Cross of Reality" on which he has to face backward to the past, forward to the future, inward toward himself and outward toward the world. He brings this cross paradigm to life, not as an abstract idea, not as his idea, but as a new model of the human reality, a model which he invites us to discover with him. I see him now, grabbing a piece of chalk and striking the blackboard with a great horizontal line: the time axis of the cross. Then a vertical slash to represent the space axis. This visual depiction becomes an icon for all his students, an icon of our human predicament....and our potential.

Since each of us lives at the center of this cross, at the center of the world's times and spaces, our lives are crucial, not only for ourselves but for all humankind. We are constantly torn between the need to be true to the achievements of past time and the need to respond to the new callings of the future. Similarly, on the "space axis" of our lives, we are constantly trying to relate our personal, subjective "inner space" with the objective demands of the outer world, the space around us. This model applies not only to each person but to any group, even to a nation.

July 3, 1942 - My first week in the army at Fort Devens, Massachusetts I'm asked to report to the Commanding General. It seems I've broken a camp record, with the highest score ever for the "mechanical aptitude" test. My I.Q. test was only normal, but the General's curious about what I did in civilian life. I explain I was a tractor driver on a chicken farm. He suggests I apply for officer candidate school nonetheless. Later an army psychologist tells me my "genius" is related to seeing patterns in things. This makes me wonder if that's why I find the Cross of Reality so endlessly applicable.

Spring-Fall 1943 - Whenever I'm on leave from army training at Camp Edwards, Massachusetts, I visit my family and continue my discussions with Eugen. As a result, think I'd someday rather teach history than philosophy. Or certainly not the traditional philosophy which seeks timeless truths, like the good, the true and the beautiful. What's needed now is a philosophy of time, one that will correct our Cartesian obsession with matter and space.

When we pray to God we do not establish contact with a "being" who "exists" somewhere outside ourselves. We establish contact, instead, with the past, present and future of ourselves and humankind. Those are God's three tenses--the trinity of Father, Son and Spirit.

But if God is not a "being" who "exists," then to whom do we pray? Do we pray merely to ourselves? No, we pray to the triune God. He is ourselves insofar as we are the responsive Son. But He is also the people and all the creation which have gone before us--our inheritance, the story in which we live. In this sense He is our Father. And we pray also toward the future, to our children, our heirs, to the future generations of the race. As we pray that they too may have life, we pray to the Holy Spirit to give them that life.

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There'll be no problem getting up the beach exit road, since the most concentrated air bombardment in history, 3,000 tons, will have devastated the huge 100' wide, 5' high and 3' thick concrete barrier erected to block the road. On the right side of that exit road, high on the bluff, is a large pillbox with 75 millimeter guns and machine guns, but it too will have been pulverized into dust by our B-17 s.

The first engineers on the beach will mark our Omaha Dog Green sector by setting up a large canvas banner with a big green "D" on it. We scouts will cross the channel on an LCT (landing craft tank), carrying 30 men plus six trucks with ammunition. Engineers will start landing to blow up obstacles between 5:30 and 6:00. H-hour for first wave of infantry boats is 6:30. We'll be in the 13^th wave, landing at 9:00 with infantry from the 116^th regiment of the 29^th Division. By then the earlier infantry should be several miles in, so we needn't expect heavy fire on landing. Still, we scouts are armed with 3 hand grenades and we're ready to fight as infantry if needed.

June 4 - Our convoy of LCTs heads out of Southampton at 5:00 a.m., two abreast, two endless lines, more than a hundred ships, aimed for Calais to fool the Nazis. We're three hours out when a radio message comes: seas too high for landing tomorrow, turn back to port. The two lead LCTs make a u-turn and head back, making our armada four lines wide. Reminds me of columns of dancers winding past each other during a square dance at Camp William James in Tunbridge. German radar or U-boats must have seen us; what did they think?

June 5 - This will have to be the real thing, since tides won't be right again for a month; we set out again at 5:00 a.m.

At noon, half way across the channel, I look out over our convoy and imagine the scene as poetry, some lines I might flesh out after the war:

Two ribbons of ships stretch east, tying the horizons.
Bobbing like bathtub toys, our metal armada
Clanks toward Calais.
A hundred landing craft, with fire of engines' fury,
Split icy waves, urge themselves forward.
Sky's grey dome settles over us like a lid.
This scene was not made for the sun.
 

Three-and-a-half hours later it's our turn. A mile away 100' cliffs above the beach suddenly emerge from mist of low clouds and smoke of gunfire. I'm surprised to see the church tower in Vierville still rising over the cliff-top trees. Machine-gun bullets splash the water around us and clank on our ship's metal sides; LCT maneuvers between two still-mined toys, grates to a halt on sand; commander shouts "the ramp is down," and we jump off into two feet of water, lower our heads and wade twenty feet to shore, with trucks unloading behind us.

Beach is strewn with hundreds of bodies. There's no big green canvas "D." With its camouflage net still neatly in place, that pillbox to right of the beach exit road is spitting fire on us; and that huge concrete barrier blocking the road is untouched. "The most concentrated air bombardment in history" has completely missed its target.

I dash across fifty feet of sand; take cover in tall beach grass on an embankment, where 116^th infantry soldiers are busy digging foxholes. Dig my own fast; hunch down in it. Looks like the infantry haven't captured any part of that cliff, about two hundred yards away.

After recalling those events of the last three weeks and yesterday, I must have dozed off. Beachhead looks quite different now at 3:15 p.m., with orderly movement of trucks and troops, no enemy fire. Try more K-rations and water. Feel unexpectedly refreshed, perhaps at sight of success, where yesterday saw only failure. Begin to think I'll survive after all. Take journal out of field bag and write up recollections of yesterday.

Doctor, a Captain, removes bandage from my helmet hole. "You're lucky, Lieutenant," he says. "That shell just ploughed through your scalp, right down to your skull, but the bone isn't fractured at all, just scarred." He explains to me that the mush which I thought was my brains was actually the half inch of flesh we have above the skull. Gives me local anesthetic since their morphine was lost in landing. While the Captain holds my head still, two Majors twist and jerk my helmet for several minutes before it finally unhooks from my scalp. Not a comfortable process, but very little pain. They show me the helmet. Hole's as big as I'd thought it was:

 Doctors dress wound with a huge white gauze bandage, covering my head. Meanwhile sniper bullets are zipping through top of the tent. One of the Majors says "this is quite a contrast with my practice in Miami." After an hour of attention, I am put on a stretcher to wait for the truck down to beach, then boat back to England.

6:15 p.m. - Sky's beginning to dim. Now the invasion is over for me; start thinking back over the whole experience. We should have had a more flexible, less mechanical, model for this assault. The Cross of Reality shows that, in every event of life, we are trapped in coordinates of changing times and spaces. The challenge is to assess each new configuration of these coordinates, respond in a timely fashion to each new situation. The future does not come into existence when we simply add the present to the past; one either creates the future by an intentional act or it breaks in upon one unexpectedly. In other words, expect the unexpected.

The trouble on Omaha beach began when those B-17s dropped "the most concentrated air bombardment in history" not on Rommel's pillboxes and barrier but somewhere inland. At the time of 4:30 a.m., they missed the space coordinates of Vierville. When the infantry from the 116^th reached those same coordinates at 6:30 a.m., they were unable to assess and respond to this new situation. The grand plan for Omaha was beautiful, with its 20-plus waves of landings, its beach divided into Easy Red, Dog Green, and so on, its great colorful canvas signs waiting to greet and orient each new wave of landing craft. But its perfect conception was too abstract, too systematic. Had there been more flexible thinking in the planning, the imperfect and the unexpected would have been taken for granted. Plans "B" and "C" would have been waiting in case plan "A" was not working out. Special teams of infantry and engineers would have been ready to blow up the barriers and pillboxes if the B-17s missed them. We'd have been off the beach in the morning; hundreds, maybe thousands, of lives would have been saved.

Another and more personal thought passes through my mind: how, in the past two years, I'd lived through the four phases of any significant experience, as they are shown on the Cross of Reality. Huessy said that anything important in life begins through listening to some future imperative; next there is a subjective questioning and working out of one's response within the inner self; third, one takes action, entering the stream of history, a relation to past time; finally, one's action becomes visible to everyone, objectively.

That's just what's happened to me:

1. The future imperative that I faced, in spring of 1942, was to put my life on the line in the face of Hitler's threat. I'd responded to this imperative, to assure there would be a future, by volunteering for the army.

2. The subjective inner experience was learning how to become a soldier, at Camp Davis and Camp Edwards, preparing myself to carry out the future imperative.

3. But I didn't really take decisive action, entering the stream of history, until our LCT shoved off from Southampton, then landed on Omega Dog Green. As I, and a thousand others, have held on to this narrow beach, we've been radically changing our times.

4. Finally, this evening of D+1, the tension of these last two years, and especially of these last two days, is over. For the first time, I can reflect on what has happened, think about the whole experience objectively.

6:50 p.m. - Pickup truck, with open sides adapted for stretchers, carries four of us from field hospital to cliff above Omaha Beach, parks there to wait for our LCI, due about 7:30.

Staring out from my stretcher, I am filled with awe. That wall of ships, that vast armada, still fills the horizon, stretching unbroken from west to east. As I drink in this scene, I feel a sharpened sense of this moment in history, a deepened sense of time. It is as if the times are gathered here tonight. Now Normandy will mark the turning point, the time when the West finally thrust all its weight against the wall of concrete and barbed wire which has strangled Europe and Asia for half a decade. Tonight our thrust through this wall is only a few miles deep, only a toehold. But all those ships that darken the horizon are a promise that we will stay.

And I feel a deepened sense of space, of how these ships have assembled from two hemispheres and of how we are now fighting on two fronts. From New York, Southampton, and Moscow, we have assembled to march on Berlin and Tokyo. The 29th Division from Pennsylvania has now joined with the Red Army, with General Zhukov's divisions advancing from Rumania. All these different places, all these separate spaces are linking up into an interdependent whole.

Besides my deepened sense of times and spaces, I begin to imagine all the peoples who will have heard of D-Day. I imagine their faces and "hear" their voices, voices of people awaiting liberation, cries of those starving behind that wall of concrete and wire. From Paris to Amsterdam to Oslo, from Warsaw to Prague to Athens, from Chunking to Rangoon to Manila, there are cheers arising in a multitude of tongues. Around the world, they're praying for us.

My sense of time gathering, of space expanding, of voices speaking, is culminating in a vision of wholeness, a vision like the one I had three years ago at Dartmouth. Now, as then, I feel a transcendence, not a lifting out of my body but a centeredness within it, not a rising above times and spaces but a sense of their converging within me.

I decide to pray with the same deliberate intensity as on that night of May 29, 1941. I ask if this vision of wholeness, this sense of peace in the middle of a desperate battle, is somehow confirmation of what I saw and heard and felt three years ago. And now, as then, my answer comes with a profound sense of being addressed. It is as if God were telling me that He comes to us in midst of life, that His revelation does not come from some other world, that His spirit speaks in each of us, that we bear His cross when we live at the center of life, at that point where times and spaces intersect and are remade whenever we say the timely word and perform the timely act.

And now, as in 1941, my sense of vision goes beyond thinking. The evening sky is cloudy and gray. But, as I stare even more intently at the horizon and the wall of ships, and as I focus my prayers, the gray sky seems to turn to a purple hue. The great body of water and bluffs around me expand in size and acquire an unexpected beauty.

The whole vision of times, spaces, voices and color, the sense of being clearly addressed, last for only a few minutes, but long enough for me to know that my sense of calling had been reconfirmed and that my experience in 1941 was not a one-time fluke. I also felt a confirmation that such visionary experiences were not something reserved for "mystics" or visionaries but could be part of any normal human being's experience. They would be abnormal, signs of mental illness, only if they broke in upon us frequently or without our hoping for them.

It's almost 8:00 p.m. when our truck drives out on a metal ramp and our stretchers are unloaded into the huge hold of an LCI, just like the ones I watched this morning.

There must be a hundred stretchers spread out on this ship's metal floor. Most of us are now hooked up to intravenous tubes and getting our first shots of morphine. Before that puts me to sleep, I want to think of an epitaph for the thousands who must have died on Omaha and all the other beaches. What is the right epitaph for David, who died beside me last night? I look through my red journal, which is full of epigraphs. I find one from Dostoevsky, from The Brothers Karamazov, that novel which filled my summer of 1940. It's from Father Zossima's dying recollections: "In truth, we are each responsible to all for all." That's clear. We are our brother's keeper.

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June 30, Salisbury, England - Last week a surgeon, Captain Bradford, took 2" x 2" patch of skin from my right leg, used it to close hole in scalp. Yesterday an English major from British War Museum came to ask if they might have my helmet. Said hole is biggest on record--for a survivor in either world war. "Sorry," I said, "I may want to show this to my grandchildren." Daily morphine induces happy glow....nurses entrancing: dark eyes, radiant hair. Salisbury cathedral's tall spire rises like a bishop's miter above hill in view from window. Perhaps I should marry a nurse there! No such luck. Today learned I'll not be sent home, go back to Normandy next month.

August 3 , St. Lo, Normandy - In a "repo-depo," (army slang for replacement depot) 20 miles in from Omaha beach. Had to go AWOL (absent without leave) to locate 110^th since repo-depo people don't give a damn about sending you back to your old outfit. Wakened 4:30 a.m. by violent thunder of artillery barrage; sleeping bag pummeled by giant white rabbits bouncing in terror from noise. 155 millimeter guns are sending shells over us into German lines. First Army hopes to break out of beachhead today, strike out for Paris.

August 25 , Paris - As scout in our reconnaissance jeep, I'm among first Americans in Paris. Got this assignment since I'm designated as our battalion's " interpreter." The 110^th will be only American outfit to enter the city tomorrow, since we're temporarily attached to the French division, under General Leclerc, which has been given the honor of "taking Paris" (though US divisions now encircle it). Leclerc had no antiaircraft. Civilians give us exuberant greetings, sparkling champagne, equally sparkling kisses. My French at Exeter, German at Dartmouth, have certainly paid off!

August 26, Paris - 10:15 p.m. in dark of radar command post, watching white blips on green screen as Germans send four bombers in over Ile St. Louis where we know they've left a munitions depot. Give command "commence firing," see two blips fall off screen, two others turn away. We may have saved Notre Dame, since the blast of munitions exploding on Ile St. Louis, less than a quarter mile away, could easily have reached cathedral.

September 20, Liege, Belgium - Every hour or so one of those new German V-2 rockets comes streaming down from stratosphere, explodes in Liege, sometimes quite near us. Seem to have about ton of explosive, dig hole about 50' diam. 20' deep. But seldom hit anything significant, don't kill many, maybe twenty deaths a day. Can see them coming in on us, leaving a white vapor trail as they enter atmosphere. Also the less exotic V-1 buzz bombs, around since June, cruise over us regularly, chugging along at 200 m.p.h., only 500' up, spitting fire out their tails, apparently planning to dive on Antwerp.

December 12, Bastogne, Belgium - Just delivered four truckloads of 155 millimeter shells to this little town. For past two weeks have commanded Red Ball express unit of six trucks from 110^th assigned to bringing up shells and gasoline from Liege to towns nearer front, preparing for our advance out of this Ardennes forest and into Germany. Front and border only about 20 miles away.

Biting cold in this forest, maybe 10 degrees. Firs so tall and close you see no needled branches. Not friendly trees that filter light but dark, threatening trees, closing around us like prison bars. Beneath them lies six inches of snow, and lowering over them every day are clouds that seem to touch that white mantle. Glad we're stationed up in Spa's open fields, not down here in this white-out of Bastogne.

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Chapter 2 opens nine days later in a town about 20 miles east of Spa and 30 miles north of Bastogne.