The High Cost of War
By Charles Rush
June 1, 2014
John 15: 13-15
venty years ago, we were preparing to storm the beaches
at Normandy and enter the 2nd World War in one of our finer moments.
A few years ago, I had a particularly rowdy bunch of boys in Confirmation that needed something special,
so I asked Wilbur Nelson if he would come one evening and talk to the boys about what it was like to be
part of that invasion. Wilbur thought about it and called me back that he would come.
He shows up
with some picture books that had photos taken of the invasion. The boys were 13
and I explained to them that Wilbur was only 19 during that invasion. They started racing through the books to find
the pictures of the most gory scenes of death. My heart leapt into my throat
for a moment, wondering how Wilbur would react. But ever the educator, ever the
Boys camp director, he had a seasoned patience.
One of the
boys saw a picture of a German submarine. Wilbur explained that the U-Boats as
they were called were on patrol throughout the region and were fearsome to
experience. “Did you ever see one?” asked one of the boys.
Then Wilbur
told them the story. I think it was two days before the invasion. I believe he
was on a mid-sized boat that held about 200 sailors, doing patrols off the
coast of Britain. One of the boats in the flotilla had experienced engine
trouble and Wilbur was assigned with 4 or 5 other guys to leave the boat they
were on, get on the damaged boat and get it towed back into harbor to be worked
on. Late that night, they got a radio communication that the boat he'd gotten
off of a few hours earlier had been spotted by a U-boat. The U-boat fired a
torpedo right into the hull of the boat and it killed all the guys on the boat.
The military
command was in black out at the time. The operation that they were planning was
so big that they couldn't risk any communication being intercepted by the
Germans. They wouldn't even give the German High command confirmation that the
boat went down. And Wilbur and the other sailors were told that they were
forbidden from talking about the incident.
I didn't know
that story. So, you are 19. All the guys on your boat, probably a bunch of the
guys that you went to basic training with, probably most of the guys that you
are close with at that point in your life. You get to England. You are not even
in the war yet really. You're doing
routine surveillance at night, only a few days into this assignment, and all of
them are dead.
And you can't
call your Mom. You can't write about it to your sweetheart. You can't even take
the night off and have a few beers with your 5 guys that are left. No you are
to finish your assignment, get re-assigned.
And two days
later, Wilbur was on one of the medic boats that followed the attacks onto the
shore. His job was to pick up the dead and the wounded off the beach and get
them back to the hospital.
The room was
quiet. I said, ‘he was only 6 years older than you guys'. I just can't help but
say a prayer for that 19 year old kid, not that the guys from that generation
ever asked for our prayers. But maybe we let them be too strong for too long.
I read the
reflection from the Marine in the Wall Street Journal last week saying that he
never expected to get pity from citizens for being a Marine. He didn't think he
needed any pity, nor that everyone suffered from PTSD. And I understand that
our Veterans are surely subjected to a lot of overly sentimental gratitude
these days which just misses the mark. But I would say that the trauma of war is
deeper and broader than we realize and empathic identification is in order. We
asked too much of our men and women serving our country, even if they were
willing to do it.
Several years
ago, I was on a Bridges Run with our youth. We were in Battery Park, handing
out sandwiches and soup. Something came on the radio that one of the homeless
guys had on loud, a reference to Jimi Hendrix or Woodstock. I said to all the
guys in line “June 1969, what were you doing? Where did you live?”
First guy
said, “I was in Da Nang”
The second guy
said, “I was in country just south of the DMT”.
On and on it
went. And I realized that a very good percentage of our homeless guys at Bridges
were Vietnam Veterans. I wasn't completely surprised but I never looked at that
work the same again. The damage and trauma of war is palpable, even if you
can't easily measure it.
It is true
that most people come back, especially from World War 2 and resumed lives of
normalcy. But with the funerals of the soldiers of that generation, I'm always
astonished at just what responsibility was thrust upon them at a tender young
age.
I think of
Pete Moran. Most people at Christ Church only knew Pete when he was in his late
70's, early 80's. He was an usher in the church, a man not afraid to sport the
plaid, bravely so. He had that big Celtic smile and friendly handshake. Just a
great guy you would welcome as your uncle. He was also drafted in college, trained
as a bomber pilot In his very first mission, again at the ripe old age of 19 or
so, he was flying from the South of France into Germany. On the return, the
Germans opened a full barrage of artillery flack that hit Pete's plane several
times. Of course he was the co-pilot, but of the 12 guys on the plane,
something like 6 or 7 of them had been shot dead, including the pilot. The
right engine had been shot out, so Pete had to steer putting all his weight to
the left to keep the plane even, flying as far as he could to try and get past
the enemy lines. At last, the plane went down in a field. Everyone expected it
to explode upon impact. Miraculously it didn't. Pete passed out in the cockpit.
He awoke with the 4 remaining guys smashing through the glass, risking their
own lives, to pull him out of the cockpit. They ran through the field carrying
Pete until they were far enough from the plane and he lay there in the mown hay
until his head cleared.
I said to him,
“Pete, you guys were behind enemy lines, you don't know how far it is past them
to the allies, the night is falling, what do you do?”
Pete said,
“Chuck, we were 19, we got drunk.” Smile. The immortality of youth.
But you know
what. Pete told me that those guys that lived through that flight, they wouldn't
fly for anyone else except him. From day one, he was their captain, a kind of
lucky/skilled charm that would get them home to their girlfriends. We put all
that responsibility on those boys. They were 19.
Or Steve
Fellows who died a couple years ago. Steve, married to Jeanne, raised 5 kids in
Summit, members of our church. Every time you saw him, no matter what was going
on, he greeted you with a smile and a joke.
I think he was
just 22 years old, old enough to be an officer when he was drafted, but a young
officer that got promoted in the field. He was in the Philippines, on one of
those collections of islands that all form a connected archipelago. The
Americans had just taken the Philippines from the Japanese but the whole region
in the sea there was the front lines of the war.
Steve was the
ranking officer in this outpost, so he had to relate to the locals. These
islands were largely inhabited by native clans that had very little contact
with Europeans ever. They spoke a variety of languages, very primitive
civilizations. And here is the key, they were perpetually at war with one
another. It was one act of revenge after another. In addition to keeping his
supply routes open and doing reconnaissance in his area of responsibility,
Steve had to go meet with the Chiefs of these islands and get them to keep the
peace with each other so we could fight a war with the Japanese.
Apparently he
was very good. When the Americans finally had to leave the Chiefs of the tribe
had a ceremony to say goodbye. As a sign of honor, they inducted Steve as a
Prince into each of their 7 tribes I think it was. Now that he was a prince,
Steve had the right to pick a bride from the tribe, so he could have returned
home from the war with 7 wives.
But he didn't,
and here I quote from the article written in the New Jersey Star Ledger,
“Instead he returned home to his sweetheart Jeanne in Maplewood, New Jersey and
they were wed later that year.”
Now that I'm
older, what was really amazing is that those guys did all that on our behalf
and a surprising number of them went on to lead very productive lives. Wilbur
Nelson, shop teacher at Summit High School, principal Brayton Elementary School,
community leader, ran a summer camp for boys that raised a couple generations
of kids. Pete Moran, wonderful drug abuse counselor, mentor and sponsor for so
many alcoholics that turned their lives around. Steve Fellows, community
leader, church leader.
I finally
asked my mother-in-law what it was like to be on campus when the war ended,
like she was. I remember the first time I got to Princeton University walking
around the old part of the campus right around Nassau Hall. You would see the
oldest dorms and some of them had a star on them, etched in the stone. Those
were the rooms of the boys that died during the War. There are a lot of stars
etched in the stone.
My
mother-in-law got that far away look in her eyes, remembering her sophomore
year, coming back so vividly. She said, “It was crazy. You had soldiers all
over the place, straight back from Europe. Every night was like Friday night,
like the last night of your life really, at least for a group of them. They
drank, passed out in public. There were fights. The dean was out every night.
The police had to break things up and bring boys home. And the authorities, the
Dean, the police, nobody ever said anything.
Of course, we
never heard about this from our grandparents. Their generation didn't feel the
need to process everything. Of course, some of it was just too much to process.
PBS had a special on this week. One of the Veterans, now 89, said “You know I
didn't want to talk about that. I had these images. In the beginning I couldn't
stop them. I didn't want to go back there. Now it is not so bad but still…
I admire them,
the way that they went on, led their lives, tried to have normalcy around them
and through their normal families and their normal lives, to honor those that
didn't make it. They were all of them a lot like Neal Koppenol.
Neal Koppenol
taught business at Summit High School. His son Doug Koppenol went to church
here for quite a while. A few years ago, I went to see Doug in the hospital. He
was dying. He had to make some end of life decisions and his kids thought it
might be good to talk to me, even though he didn't know me.
He explained
the situation and I asked him a question I ask sometimes in that context. I
said, “Neal are you ready to die?” He was quiet for a bit.
Then he said,
“Christmas eve 1945, I was stationed in Japan. We were tasked with bringing
nationals back to the mainland in Japan from the out islands they'd escaped to
in order to dodge the war. It was below freezing and a terrific storm had
kicked up. Our boat was overfilled with people and the waves got bigger and
bigger. We were headed straight into the waves and they were so big that the
bow of the boat was out of the water for a couple long seconds with each wave.
You could see the bow bend. We had a couple hundred people on board and I was
on deck the whole night, watching that bow come out of the water with each
wave.
Those boats
weren't made of cast iron like a destroyer. They were just sheets of metal
welded together. I kept watching those welds hour after hour, just waiting for
them to come apart and the boat to just collapse into the freezing sea. I was
sure we were all going to die.
Just before
dawn the seas suddenly died down and the storm was over. We sailed into Tokyo
bay at dawn, the first rays of light streaming over the city. Chuck, every day
since then has been plus one…”
I said “Neal,
have you ever told your kids that story?” He shook his head ‘no'. I said,
“Neal, it is time.” What a great way to look at your life, really the only way
spiritually to look at your life. The tragic and the comic, through boredom and
exhilaration, it has all been a blessing. Be grateful.
It is true
that we owe these veterans better health care than we are giving them at the
moment. And it is true that even without a formal diagnosis of PTSD, we owe
them our support because as far as I can tell, they are all changed by what
they have been through. It is true that we need to work hard to avoid being
sucked into wars in the future because the human cost is just so great.
But perhaps
the greatest honor that we can pay the is to live lives of grateful normalcy,
to love our families and to live in reconciliation and joy, to drink in all the
vital things that life has to offer, to keep alive the spiritual wonder that we
are here. Our thanks is to pass that blessing forward and to live in freedom
and fulfillment. We can't repay them and they don't want us to. This will be
enough.