Peace on Veterans’ Day
The second lieutenant wondered how long he had left to live. It was a toss-up whether he would bleed to death before he froze to death.
At that moment, the question was little more than an absurd academic exercise to him, as if he was trying to win a debate with himself. How unusual, he thought, that he could be intellectually detached from something as intimate as his impending death.
He considered the relative merits of death by hypothermia, compared to dying from loss of blood.
When he studied French in high school and college, no one had told him that France could get this cold. Then he thought to himself that it was November, after all, and it had been cold for a couple of months — too early for snow, but still cold, like November back home. Even so, somehow it seemed colder right then. The blood on his uniform and on his hands and on his shattered legs felt freezing cold, as it hardened into a sticky black-red mass. He assumed it was his own blood, but with so much blood spilled all around him, he wasn't sure.
He could feel the natural warmth leaching from his body. He remembered his fits of shivering soon after he was hit, but that was over now. Shock had set in. He was in that not-entirely-unpleasant mental and physical state that shock sometimes causes — anesthetized from pain, anesthetized from caring. He had read somewhere — maybe Jack London? — that in its last stages, freezing to death was as comfortable as slipping off into a deep and restful sleep. He deserved to sleep. He deserved to rest.
He wanted very much to live, but if he had to die, he thought freezing may have been preferable to bleeding to death.
Still, bleeding to death had its advantages. Notably, it was fast — only minutes if an artery was severed. The fact that he was still alive hours after the attack told him that the shrapnel had, for the most part anyway, hit bone and muscle — perhaps enough damage to cripple — maybe — but perhaps not enough to kill — maybe.
He wanted to live, but if he died tonight, he thought, it would probably be from the cold.
At that moment, the question was little more than an absurd academic exercise to him, as if he was trying to win a debate with himself. How unusual, he thought, that he could be intellectually detached from something as intimate as his impending death.
He considered the relative merits of death by hypothermia, compared to dying from loss of blood.
When he studied French in high school and college, no one had told him that France could get this cold. Then he thought to himself that it was November, after all, and it had been cold for a couple of months — too early for snow, but still cold, like November back home. Even so, somehow it seemed colder right then. The blood on his uniform and on his hands and on his shattered legs felt freezing cold, as it hardened into a sticky black-red mass. He assumed it was his own blood, but with so much blood spilled all around him, he wasn't sure.
He could feel the natural warmth leaching from his body. He remembered his fits of shivering soon after he was hit, but that was over now. Shock had set in. He was in that not-entirely-unpleasant mental and physical state that shock sometimes causes — anesthetized from pain, anesthetized from caring. He had read somewhere — maybe Jack London? — that in its last stages, freezing to death was as comfortable as slipping off into a deep and restful sleep. He deserved to sleep. He deserved to rest.
He wanted very much to live, but if he had to die, he thought freezing may have been preferable to bleeding to death.
Still, bleeding to death had its advantages. Notably, it was fast — only minutes if an artery was severed. The fact that he was still alive hours after the attack told him that the shrapnel had, for the most part anyway, hit bone and muscle — perhaps enough damage to cripple — maybe — but perhaps not enough to kill — maybe.
He wanted to live, but if he died tonight, he thought, it would probably be from the cold.
Heard the screams
The internal debate had focused what little rational thinking ability he had left on his injuries.
He couldn't move his legs. He couldn't feel his legs. From where he was laying on his back, he couldn't see his legs. He hoped they were still there. He couldn't move his body below the waist, not that he wanted to. He was too cold and tired to want to move, even if he could. The memory of the pain he suffered hours before had numbed his mind, changed it somehow, so that every thought seemed to form outside normal time and space.
The only blessing was that the shock and the cold had taken the pain itself from his senses. For now, anyway, he had only the memory of his former agony to contend with. With his body shutting down a bit at a time, his only torture was the torture left in his mind. Ironically, holding the memory of the pain carried with it a compensation: It crowded out his fear, pushing it away, allowing him to think more clearly.
The pain had been beyond anything he had ever felt before. Pieces of red-hot flying metal had violated his legs, his hips, his thighs, pushing him backwards, into a foxhole.
So much for his first field command. He had no orders to give. It wouldn't have mattered anyway. There was no one left to give them to.
From where he was laying on his back in the foxhole, he could only look up and see the sky, what there was of it to see. It was dark — very dark, with the black clouds merging into the horizon, so it seemed to him that he was at the bottom of a pit.
At least there was no more noise. It was quiet now, not like a few hours before, when the Germans had attacked, sending a mortar barrage straight at his platoon. It all came so fast, seemingly from all directions at once, with the shells exploding so loudly that they were almost beyond his ability to hear.
It was utter chaos, mixed with pure terror, with just seconds enough to sprawl on to the ground and hope to live to see the sunrise. There was no time to give orders, no time for intricate strategies, gleaned from books written by generals after they studied the last war. There was no time for heroism, nor for cowardice. In the space of a few minutes, 40 trained, equipped and combat-hardened Army infantrymen had been reduced to a collection of scattered body parts and bloody faces, with open eyes that looked in terror — but could no longer see anything.
In the first moments after it was over, the second lieutenant heard several of his men moaning and screaming. One private, just a kid really, 18, maybe 19, years old, had been hit in the head with a piece of shrapnel. The second lieutenant heard the boy's constant screams of agony and terror for what seemed like hours.
The second lieutenant could do nothing, except lay in a pool of his own blood, mixed with pieces of his shattered bones, and listen.
Finally, it all fell silent.
The young officer assumed everyone else in his platoon was dead. He was right.
It was his last thought before he lost consciousness.
The second lieutenant could do nothing, except lay in a pool of his own blood, mixed with pieces of his shattered bones, and listen.
Finally, it all fell silent.
The young officer assumed everyone else in his platoon was dead. He was right.
It was his last thought before he lost consciousness.
Barely alive
Hours later, when the second lieutenant awoke the next morning, his first thought was surprise at being alive. He knew then that he had a reasonable chance to make it.
It had to have been morning, he thought. It had seemed so long ago when he felt himself drift off.
But it was very different than it had been the night before. In his first few seconds of half-consciousness, he struggled to breathe, but there was a heavy weight on his chest. He wasn't outside in his foxhole anymore, he thought, and there were heavy, inert, indefinable things pressed around and atop and below his body. It was closed in, claustrophobic.
He didn't know where he was.
Where was the open ground and the forest he remembered from the night before? If it was morning, where was the sun? Why was it still dark?
He could still use his hands — but he was still so cold that he had lost almost all sensation. Everything below his waist was still a blank, as if it wasn't there.
It was, indeed, morning. His brain was still swimming in confusion, his legs were still immobile — but somehow he was moving.
Moving?
What was happening?
Then it hit him.
He had been awake less than a minute when he knew what had happened.
He was in an Army truck, rattling down a road somewhere, in the middle of a pile of dead bodies — the dead bodies of his own men. The graves registration detail had mistaken him for dead, and thrown him in with the corpses that had once been the men in his command.
The detail had made a mistake. The second lieutenant, the 26-year-old platoon commander, was not dead, but he knew he would be if he didn't do something fast. He needed a medic. He needed a hospital. He couldn't afford to lose any more blood, or he would join his corpse-mates before this trip was over.
He was too weak to yell above the engine noise and the truck's rattle. He had to find another way to attract the driver's attention. He reached down into his fatigue pocket for his officer's whistle, and started to blow into it. What little of his strength that remained he gave to the brass whistle, offering it up, asking the whistle to take it, in return for saving him.
His life depended on the driver hearing his noise.
A few half-lungs and full whistles of air later, the young officer had cheated death. The driver had heard, pulled over, and found him, still blowing, still freezing – still alive.
Ironically, the cold that he originally believed would probably kill him ended up saving his life. Indeed, as he first surmised, the shrapnel had not hit an artery, but he had been badly wounded and had lost a remarkable amount of blood. But the Army doctors believed the cold had slowed his metabolism enough to keep him from bleeding to death.
A life of pain
The second lieutenant survived the war. He could not know, as they rushed him to an Army field hospital, that it would take 26 months and a dozen operations to allow him to walk unaided again, but he would never again have the full use of his legs and hips, and that as he aged, arthritis would settle in, and the pain would make tears roll down his face sometimes, when he struggled from a chair or tried to walk a few steps too far.
He could not imagine, in 1944, that the bad dreams would plague him until the end of his life, so that he would cry out almost every night, as he endlessly fought the phantom armies that lived in the dark corners of his mind.
He only knew then that nothing else he would ever do would ever be as important to him as what had happened on this day.
And he certainly had no way of knowing, on that cold November day in France, in 1944, that when he died more than 37 years later, some of the pieces of the German mortar shell inside his body would be buried with him. Down through the years the doctors had said it was too risky to remove them.
Never again
The second lieutenant in this story was my father, who later was promoted to become Captain Arthur John Ryan, United States Army Reserve.
In the 20 years I knew him, I saw how my father suffered from the trauma, mental and physical, brought on by his war experiences. Never again should anyone else have to go through what he did. He taught me that never again should anyone on Earth, military or civilian, have to be traumatized or maimed or killed in a war. No wife or mother or father or child should ever again have to be satisfied with a flag and a name carved in stone, as a poor replacement for a loved one who has been taken away forever.
How many people reading this have suffered?
Who can you remember in your life who had to live with such mental anguish and physical pain?
Who among your relatives and friends still suffers?
It is not enough that we erect monuments. It is not enough that we gather to offer flags and flowers once a year and read half-forgotten names off a memorial plaque. Veterans’ Day is observed on November 11th. On that day in 1918, World War I, the “War to End All Wars,” ended.
In fact, however, it was not the end. The First World War was just the beginning of the carnage – carnage on an unprecedented scale – that members of the human race are still perpetrating upon one another.
In 1941, the sons of World War One’s doughboys went off to fight and die in another world war. Their grandsons went off to fight and die in Vietnam. Their great-grandsons, and a few of their great-granddaughters, went off to fight and die in Operation Desert Storm. Others are risking their lives in Afghanistan and Iraq every day. To the more than 2,000 Americans who have died there, it’s the biggest conflict in the history of the world. I fervently hope that they have not died in vain.
Time for peace
We, as a species, owe it to the memories of the people we honor on Veterans’ Day to stop the killing. I'm not speaking of Americans or Iraqis or Afghans or anyone else in particular. It's time that human beings learn and practice the art of peace as well as they have learned and practiced the art of war. The stakes are too high today. The weapons are too horrible. Despite the end of the Cold War, the nuclear menace still hangs over every person on the planet.
That is not to say that we do not need a strong defense. How much better would the world be today, if the civilized nations had stopped Adolf Hitler in 1936?
For the foreseeable future, throughout the world there will be tyrants and monsters, dictators and despots, whom we as a species must keep in check.
But we must do it reasonably, and always remember that these are our sons and daughters we are putting in harm's way. Each one is precious. The decision to use force should be the gravest decision any leader may make. Wholesale war is a luxury the human race can no longer afford.
Most of us would like to see our children serve, but none of us want to see our children die.
But our eventual goal should be peace everywhere, forever. A fanciful goal for today, perhaps, but one you can and should begin to work for. Work for peace in your home and in your family. Work for peace in your neighborhood, in your town and in your country. Others may argue. Others may hurl insults and spout hatred — but you can and should choose not to. There is no need for us to hurt one another. There will never be peace in the world until there is peace inside us.
Remember, peace is a choice — a choice you can and should make for yourself, and for your life, today. No matter what others around you may choose to do, keep peace in your heart. It's easier than you think.
If enough of us decide to live in peace every day, it will make a difference, in our lives and around the world.
My father always said that war was the most horrible and insane thing that human beings can do to each other.
I think most of the people who have fought in wars would agree. They have given us the greatest gift imaginable, for they have taught us that the need for war is over.
Let us pay them the only fitting tribute on this Veterans’ Day: peace everlasting.
Copyright © 2006 by John D. Ryan. This may only be reproduced and distributed in its entirety, for non-commercial purposes only. All other rights reserved.
posted by Connecticut 1776 | 2:50 PM
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