When I was younger, there were a lot of World War II veterans around.
In high school, I worked in a sporting goods store alongside a guy who'd been a platoon leader in the Battle of the Bulge. My boss pointed him out, telling me I should listen to what he had to say. Which wasn't easy; he was a soft-spoken little man who didn't say much beyond "good morning " and "see you tomorrow" and "could you please run in the back and see if we've got these Chuck Taylors in a size nine?"
Like most of the combat vets I've known, Mr. Joe wouldn't talk about the war unless you asked him more than once.
Finally I caught him on a lunch break. We sat at a picnic table behind the store, and while he was pulling his fried bologna and bacon sandwich out of its wax paper, he told he'd never been so cold as he'd been in the Ardennes Forest in December 1944.
He had about 30 men under him. Most of them, he said, were about my age, maybe a year older. They came right out of high school, out of classrooms and ballfields. They'd turned it around, pushed through Normandy and liberated France into Schnee Eifel, the snowy mountains along the German border.
They were about to end the war. It had been the hardest thing any of them had ever done. They'd gotten used to the corpses and the snipers; after the Germans bugged out of a position they usually left one or two guys in the trees.
It was protocol for junior officers like Mr. Joe to walk on the left side of their superior officers. After a couple of majors got it in the neck, no one followed protocol. But they were winning. It had been weeks since there'd been snipers, and they weren't seeing much when on patrol. The only enemy troops encountered were unenthusiastic Poles who'd been dragooned into the German army, wandering around the woods cold and hungry and looking for someone to whom they could surrender.
Some of them said the Germans were massing tanks--that there was a big buildup behind the lines. Mr. Joe sent the intelligence back, but the brass was reassuring. Hitler was done, and his generals knew it. They'd be in Berlin by spring.
"We were cocky," Mr. Joe said. "Looking forward to Christmas." But early on the morning of Dec. 16, the counteroffensive began.
"It was like every tank in Christendom came over the hill," he said. "We didn't have any tanks, and their Panzers were better anyway. We didn't have any air support because the weather was lousy. We shot at them but our rifles didn't bother the tanks. All we could do was run, and there wasn't anywhere to run too. They'd cut us off. We were surrounded."
Hitler had been planning the surprise maneuver since September. He attacked with about 1,000 tanks and some 200,000 men--fresh troops, but relatively inexperienced--hoping to break through the thin line in the Ardennes, splitting the Allied Forces in half.
If the Germans could recapture Antwerp, Belgium, they could cut off the Allied supply line. It was a desperate play that, viewed in a historical context, had little chance of success.
To Mr. Joe and the boys in his charge, it was a simple massacre.
They ran, fighting as they fled. They had no vehicles, no food, no plan; they just wanted to stay alive.
"And," Mr. Joe said, "kill as many Nazis as we could."
They fired their M1 Garands until they ran out of ammunition. Then they threw them away. It was more efficient to pick up a dead comrade's weapon than it was to reload; there were bodies everywhere and guns all around. They discovered the German P38s and Lugers were better sidearms than the .45 semiautomatics they carried.
Finally, after wandering for three days, lost in the snow, they made it back to the outskirts of Bastogne, the Belgian town where Gen. Anthony McAuliffe had set up his command post. Though the Germans already had the town surrounded, Mr. Joe and the others managed to sneak past their lines and into the town.
A couple of days after that, the Germans delivered a written demand to McAuliffe that in part read: "There is only one possibility to save the encircled USA troops from total annihilation: that is the honorable surrender of the encircled town ... All the serious civilian losses caused by this artillery fire would not correspond with the well-known American humanity."
To which McAuliffe famously replied: "NUTS!"
I'd heard that part of the story before, but Mr. Joe did not tell it the way I'd heard it, like it was a thrilling tale of gallantry. He told it like it was a sad thing that happened to him. Bastogne did not fall, and the Germans did not prevail, and Hitler bit cynanide and shot himself before anyone could get to him, but we are only lucky it turned out that way.
Mr. Joe could have taken one in the neck. It wasn't his courage or competence that saved him.
He seemed like an old man then, but Mr. Joe was younger than I am now. He was only a little more than 30 years removed from the war when we had these conversations more than 40 years ago. Seems like people got old quicker back then.
I see these 60- and 70-year-olds in their colorful T-shirts and ballcaps these days and wonder where all the square, solemn, serious old men I knew in my youth have gone.
It's not hard to figure out. There are fewer than 500,000 World War II vets left these days.
I have never put too much stock in all this "Greatest Generation" nonsense; people are pretty much the same, and we all deal with the challenges time and circumstance put before us. When it comes to history, we always play the results. Mr. Joe and his buddies won, but I don't think it was because they were any braver or tougher than German or Japanese soldiers or because their cause was just.
But their cause was just and they were brave, and they did hard things most of us never had to do. I know I didn't, and if that somehow causes me to question how I might act if I was called to do what they were called to do, all I can say is I'm grateful I never had to find out.
I miss those taciturn old men, the ones you had to pester to get them to tell how it was and what they did. The ones who kept their uniforms in the closet and went about their lives holding something holy and awful down inside them, something deep and terrible like a secret.