Tom Brokaw (40 page)

THE TWILIGHT OF THEIR LIVES

“You can't pay in money for what they have done.”

As an impressionable adolescent in the postwar years, I spent hours going through Bill Mauldin's book
Up Front,
his brilliant collection of drawings and thoughts on World War II's enlisted men, officers, the people they liberated, and the enemy they fought. He was just twenty-two years old when “Willie and Joe,” his representations of American fighting men, first appeared. In his work, Mauldin shared with those on the front lines as well as those at home the hard truths and dark humor of life at war. As is so often the case with cartoons, Mauldin gave us the quick laugh and the lingering insight.

Recently, I read
Up Front
again. Initially I was pleased that I could recite from memory many of the cartoon captions; Mauldin's work leaves a lasting impression. When I began to reread the text, I had an even deeper appreciation of Mauldin's youthful genius. He'd put the book together near the end of the war, when he was just twenty-three. By then he was a sergeant, having entered the Army from the Arizona National Guard when he was eighteen. I can't imagine that anyone knew the minds, the frustrations, the fears, and the dreams of the average combat infantryman better than Mauldin did.

As his cartoons reflected the truth of what it was like to be up front, his writing gave us a vision of the future. Here is what Mauldin wrote of the American soldier before the war ended:

They are very different now. Don't let anybody tell you they aren't. . . . You can't pay in money for what they have done. They need people telling about them so they will be taken back into their civilian lives and given a chance to be themselves again.

There will be some good ones and some bad ones. But the vast majority of combat men are going to be no problem at all. They are so damned sick and tired of having their noses rubbed in the stinking war that their only ambition will be to forget it. They don't need pity because you don't pity brave men—men who are brave because they fight while they are scared to death.

Mauldin wrote those words more than half a century ago, even before the men headed home from the front lines, and it is as true today as it was then. They didn't want pity and they did want to forget. Of course, they could not forget, especially those who'd seen combat. When they couldn't erase the war from memory they simply confined it there, refusing to talk about it unless questioned, and then only reluctantly. That is why I think it's so important for us to hear these stories now, to know what an exceptional time that was for so many and how much they sacrificed to give us the world we have today.

Those stories come to us in so many ways. The heroes, the authors, and the politicians are part of a fixed library of memoirs and accounts, but in the course of working on this book I have realized how many stories still remain unknown to the larger world, confined as they are to the memories of the veterans and their families, or to the recollections of the people at home who made their own unique contributions.

N
OT ALL
of the stories are heroic or tragic. Many are memorable for the small moments they recall, for a funny line.

When his father died, Steve Friedman, a longtime friend and colleague in television, called to reminisce about what a great guy and inspiration his dad, Sol Friedman, a World War II Army veteran, had been.

Sol Friedman came back from the war and opened a grocery business in Chicago. He worked hard and raised a quintessential Chicago family: they were all active in Mayor Daley's political machine, devoted fans of the Chicago Cubs and the Bears, and lifelong residents of the same neighborhood. Sol Friedman sent his children to college, and Steve rose through the ranks of network television to become the executive producer of
Today
and
NBC
Nightly News
before going to work for CBS.

Steve says, “My old man and his buddies were the best, when you think of all they got done. They were in the Combat Engineers in the Italian campaign, all the way through. Later, when I asked him if he was ever scared, Sol said, ‘I wasn't thinking about the bullet with my name on it. It was the one marked “To Whom It May Concern” that worried me!' ” Steve and I both laughed hard, recognizing Sol's story as a perfect piece of Chicago street humor, carried to the war and back.

M
Y FRIEND
Jack Hemingway, the firstborn of Ernest Hemingway, was raised in the tradition of his adventurous father, so it was only natural that when the war came along he'd be involved with the OSS. Jack also thought it was natural, when he parachuted into France behind enemy lines, to carry in his pack a tool of his favorite sport, a fly rod. When questioned about it before takeoff, he told a superior officer it was a radio antenna.

In his splendid book
The Misadventures of a Fly-Fisherman: My
Life With and Without Papa,
Jack describes the few opportunities he had to use the fly rod in some lovely French streams before he was taken prisoner by the Germans. When I tell this story to other fishermen, they always seem to be more interested in the quality of the fishing than in Jack's fate as a prisoner. He seems to understand.

G
ENE GLICK
was a combat infantryman with the Army's 45th Division and personifies to this day the “dogface” Bill Mauldin so loved: tough, smart, and capable of finding an enduring truth in the worst possible situation. Glick, an Indiana native, was fighting in Alsace-Lorraine during the big push toward Germany, late in the fall of 1944. He says, “I'll never forget November eleventh, 1944, at eleven
A
.
M
. I dove into a slit trench. You dig a slit trench when you don't have time to dig a foxhole. It's about the size of your body—about two feet deep. There was a thin layer of ice. The shells were exploding all around. The ground shakes. You think that at any moment you're going to be killed or maimed for life. I remember thinking, Wouldn't it be wonderful if World War II ended the way World War I did—on November eleventh?”

It did not, of course. Gene Glick spent almost an hour facedown in the freezing water, with shells exploding all around him. He made a vow: “If I get out of this alive, anytime in the future, if it gets tough, I am going to remember November eleventh, 1944.”

Glick survived the shelling and returned from the war to start what turned out to be one of the most successful residential construction companies in the United States, the Gene B. Glick Company. He's still on the job at the age of seventy-seven, although he's always willing to take a moment to tell you about his four daughters and his grandchildren. He took them to France in 1995 and had his grandchildren pose next to the headstones at a World War II cemetery so that, in his words, they would be reminded of “the tragedy of men not learning to live together in peace.”

And what about that moment, November eleventh, eleven
A
.
M
., 1944? Gene Glick says that to this day, “It's like a guiding star. When things don't go right, when people disappoint me and projects don't work out, I think, Hey, Glick, November eleventh, 1944. No problem!”

B
ILL MAULDIN
didn't know Mary Garber. She wasn't a dogface. She wasn't even in uniform. But in her own way, Mary Garber was changed by the war and by what came after. Moreover, what she did changed the world for so many of her gender.

She had a lifelong dream to be a newspaper sports reporter, but in the late thirties and early forties it was unheard of for a woman to cover sports—it was extremely difficult for a woman to be hired for anything except the society pages. That's how she began at the
Winston-Salem Journal
in North Carolina. When the paper offered her the job as society editor, she says, “I didn't want the job, but you had to get your foot in the door.” When nearly every man on the paper's staff went off to the war, Mary finally had her chance to cover sports, but when the war ended, so did her dream-come-true. She was sent back to the society pages.

But Mary didn't give up. She volunteered to cover the contests the men in the sports department were ignoring. In those postwar years in North Carolina, the black schools received virtually no attention, so Mary became their champion on the sports pages, covering their games. She reasoned, “The parents of black athletes are just as interested as white parents.”

The payoff came when a black policeman stopped her one day and said, “I don't know if you know how much the middle-aged black men in our town admire and love you.”

As she quietly made her way as a woman in an all-male environment, she kept a particular eye on Jackie Robinson, who was then integrating Major League baseball. “I watched what he did,” she says. “He did his job, kept his mouth shut. That's what I did.” Well, not always. When Duke University barred her from the press box during a football game because she was a woman, Mary went directly to her managing editor. In turn, he fired off a letter to all of the local colleges, warning that if the practice continued, there would be no coverage of their games.

Mary went on to integrate postgame interviews, another all-male club, and to set a national standard for women in sportswriting. She was so prolific and so highly regarded in sports-crazy North Carolina that she was inducted into the state's athletic hall of fame, which also includes the legendary basketball coach Dean Smith and golfer Arnold Palmer.

Although officially retired for more than ten years, she still writes for the
Winston-Salem Journal.
To mark her forty years in sports-writing, a longer sports journalism career than any other woman in the nation, the paper published a front-page article on Mary and had it framed to hang on a wall next to the
Journal
's Pulitzer Prize. On the back of the frame there is a note: “This is to hang here as long as the paper exists.”

Mary Garber's career contributions are among the innumerable unexpected consequences of World War II, when the men went away and the women stepped in. For her part, Mary prefers that her legacy be measured by the comments of two young boys at a soap-box derby she was covering. Pointing to her, one of the boys said, “Who's that?” The other answered, “That's Mary Garber. If you do something, doesn't matter who you are, she'll write about you.”

W
ARTIME AMERICA
was forced by necessity to confront its hypocrisy concerning equality under the law. The war started the country on the road to long-overdue changes that finally came in the sixties for women and blacks. Discrimination by gender and race remains an unresolved challenge in this society, but the World War II experience accelerated the solution in ways large and small.

Dr. Helen Strauss, who was named New Jersey's psychologist of the year in 1997 for her longtime work with children and low-income families, was a WAVE during the war. She recalls Eleanor Roosevelt visiting her unit and observing, “I don't see any Negro faces here.”

Shortly thereafter, two black women were assigned to Strauss's department, and as she escorted one of them, making introductions, another white WAVE, with deep family roots in Virginia, deliberately picked up her compact and began powdering her nose, utterly ignoring the new arrival.

Dr. Strauss remained friends with the black woman, Frances Willis Thorpe, until Thorpe's death in early 1998. As for the Virginia woman, so proud of her Confederate ancestors, she, too, was changed by the experience. Dr. Strauss says that years later the woman called to apologize for her behavior, expressing her deep embarrassment.

O
THER MEMBERS
of the greatest generation found their life's calling in uniform, continuing to serve in the military after the war and helping it adapt to the changing times. One of these is retired Army colonel Robert Nett, who enlisted in the National Guard in his hometown of New Haven, Connecticut, as a private with no thought of staying beyond the time required.

By the time he retired in 1973, he had been in uniform for thirty-three years; had fought in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam; had been awarded the Medal of Honor for conspicuous gallantry in spearheading an attack against a heavily fortified Japanese position in the Philippines; and had a street named after him at Fort Benning, Georgia, where he continued to teach Army leadership courses after his retirement. And not incidentally, he's been married for fifty-four years to an Army nurse, Frances, whom he met while recovering from wounds. Their son, Robert Nett Jr., is a physician who retired as a major in the U.S. Army.

Colonel Nett could have lived on his Army pension and the glories of his distinguished military career when he retired, but instead he became an industrial-arts teacher in the Muscogee County, Georgia, school system for fifteen years. He liked the two fronts of his life, and moved easily between his junior- and senior-high students and his officer candidates at nearby Fort Benning. Nett felt that he could extend the lessons of his military experience by teaching young people “that they should walk proud in the light of what their fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers have accomplished. In addition to education,” Colonel Nett says, “students must learn to appreciate the views of others.” He was so popular that he was named the county's Teacher of the Year in 1985, and one of his students successfully nominated him to help carry the Olympic torch when the Olympic Games were coming to Atlanta in 1996.

At Fort Benning, Nett is such a legendary figure that former Army students who have moved up in the ranks still call on him to help train or motivate their troops. In 1997 he visited eight training sites in Bosnia to boost the morale of forces assigned there to peacekeeping roles.

The colonel's message is built on four points: