Soldiers Under Any Flag Can Be Great Warriors: The Forgotten Soldier

 A 17-Year-Old draftee 

on the Eastern Front

for the entire war. 

I just started re-reading "The Forgotten Soldier." First published in English in 1971, the book is a memoir by a 17-year-old French boy drafted into the German Army in 1942.  The book is 600 pages of wrenching details about the life of a German soldier on the Eastern Front for nearly the entire war.

Though he had no choice about serving, Guy Sajer was scorned when he tried to go home after the war.  He suffered cold and every sort of misery and finally defeat, then came home to rejection by family and friends.  At the end of World War II, Guy Sajer was just 21 years old and a veteran of nearly four years of continuous combat with a losing army. He was on his way to the front when news reached his convoy of the Russian victory over the German 6th Army at Stalingrad.

I read this book in 1977 when I was a 24-year-old tank commander in West Germany, waiting for a million-man Soviet Army to invade Western Europe starting in Fulda and leaving me and and everyone in 4th Brigade, 4th Infantry Division dead on the field just west of the Fulda Gap.

Reading this book helped me to understand how the southern men I served with could venerate soldiers who fought to keep other men enslaved.  It was clear from this memoir, that a soldier can be a hero in a bad cause.

In 2017 when I visited the German Military Cemetery at Normandy, I thought of Guy Sajer--a kid drafted into a losing cause who serves with honor and heroism until the end.  I honor him as a man while knowing the flag that he served under is a symbol of hatred.

After the war, Sajer became a comics artist, creating comics under his own name and pen names.  He is 94 years old and lives in Paris.

I will be writing more about specific parts of the book.  Anyone interested in the life of a soldier in combat, especially the life of a soldier in a losing cause, this book is a haunting reminder of how terrible war is.

“What happened next? I retain nothing from those terrible minutes except indistinct memories which flash into my mind with sudden brutality, like apparitions, among bursts and scenes and visions that are scarcely imaginable. It is difficult even to even to try to remember moments during which nothing is considered, foreseen, or understood, when there is nothing under a steel helmet but an astonishingly empty head and a pair of eyes which translate nothing more than would the eyes of an animal facing mortal danger. There is nothing but the rhythm of explosions, more or less distant, more or less violent, and the cries of madmen, to be classified later, according to the outcome of the battle, as the cries of heroes or of murderers. And there are the cries of the wounded, of the agonizingly dying, shrieking as they stare at a part of their body reduced to pulp, the cries of men touched by the shock of battle before everybody else, who run in any and every direction, howling like banshees. There are the tragic, unbelievable visions, which carry from one moment of nausea to another: guts splattered across the rubble and sprayed from one dying man to another; tightly riveted machines ripped like the belly of a cow which has just been sliced open, flaming and groaning; trees broken into tiny fragments; gaping windows pouring out torrents of billowing dust, dispersing into oblivion all that remains of a comfortable parlor...” 
― Guy Sajer, The Forgotten Soldier

And about how war can tear up our souls:

“Abandoned by a God in whom many of us believed, we lay prostrate and dazed in our demi-tomb. From time to time, one of us would look over the parapet to stare across the dusty plain into the east, from which death might bear down on us at any moment. We felt like lost souls, who had forgotten that men are made for something else, that time exists, and hope, and sentiments other than anguish; that friendship can be more than ephemeral, that love can sometimes occur, that the earth can be productive, and used for something other than burying the dead.”
― Guy Sajer, The Forgotten Soldier

Basic Training to Combat Deployment: Just 37 Years!

C-130 Hercules: I flew on one of these on my first military 

flight in 1972 and in Iraq 37 years later.

All my life I have been late doing things:

• Nine years after high school gradation, I went to college. 
• Many kids learn to swim shortly after learning to walk. I learned to swim when I was 59 years old.  
• Ten years ago today, February 1, 2009, I was flying to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, on my way to Iraq. It had not occurred to me before that I was leaving for my first combat deployment 37 years after I started basic training on February 1, 1972.  

I enlisted during the Vietnam War, but the war ended and I never went to that one.  In 1976, I went to West Germany and served on the border in the Cold War, but thankfully, that war never happened.  I left the Army in 1980 to go to college.

Then in 2007, I re-enlisted in the Army National Guard and ten years ago today was on my  way to Iraq.

I connected the two dates because basic training and the trip to Iraq both began with saying goodbye to my family and flying away.

The very first flight in my life was the flight from Boston to San Antonio for Basic Training.  That first flight gave me a love for flying that led me to travel every chance I could on military flights.  For $10 I could fly across the nation or across an ocean.

But it was funny to think that the gap between starting Basic Training and serving in a war was 37 years.  I went to Basic at 18 years old and to Iraq at 55.

Most people had long retired at the age where my career hit one of its big milestones.

By the time I went to Iraq, I had three college degrees, but learning to swim was still four years in my future.  And it's only in the past year that I started to meditate and practice Yoga.

Who knows what I'll learn or do this year?

Happy February 1! It's a big day for me.

Ten Years Ago I Was Writing My Name on My Underwear--and Everything Else

The faded laundry mark from January 2009 

after a few hundred machine washings.

Ten years ago there were piles of Army uniforms and clothes and gear of all kinds on my living room floor.  I was sitting on the floor with my wife and occasionally one of the kids.  I was writing my name on every piece of gear I was carrying in duffel bags to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and then to Camp Adder, Iraq.

Underwear is not easy to write on, even with a marker. It was a long process to put my last name or my laundry mark (Last Initial, Last four of the Social Security Number) on t-shirts, shorts, belts, pants, shirts, hats, ammo pouches, boots, gloves and backpacks.

But write I did. Because when there is only one laundry service and everyone has sand-colored underwear, the best way to keep your stuff is to mark it.

Marking my clothes made the deployment seem oddly real.  Although we knew the deployment was coming since November of 2007, and we had several two or three-week training sessions, marking my gear meant I was really leaving.  Although I had been in and out of the military since 1972, the last time I went overseas with the Army was in the mid 70s.

As I marked my clothes, it seemed more real than before that I was leaving for an entire year.

Right now, ten years later, it is still strange to think that Fort Sill and Camp Adder are in the list of places I have lived, not just visited.