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It Really Must Have Been Hell

It was cold. Colder than you can imagine. That’s all an old friend has ever been willing to tell me about serving in combat during the Korean War. Saying more was, in a very real way, too painful for him.

What we know about the cold is that it was so bad some Americans froze to death on the battlefield.

Another friend opened up a bit about his time on a river gunboat in South Vietnam. Fresh from the United States, he and his crew had a lot to learn about the difference between warfare in the history books and that practiced during the Vietnam War.

His crew had destroyed a boat on which a number of Viet Cong troops were riding. One was in the water, screaming for help.

So my friend’s crew did what Americans do: They steered up beside the enemy soldier. A crewman on the U.S. gunboat reached down to help the man in the water.

Whereupon he threw a live hand grenade into the boat. My friend never tried to help an enemy after that.

Tomorrow will be Memorial Day, on which we as a nation pause to honor those who gave their lives for us while in military service.

In part because so many of them, like my Korean War veteran friend, are reluctant to discuss what they endured. Often, their families don’t know.

A veteran I interviewed years ago had been serving in the Philippines when World War II broke out. He was among thousands of U.S. and Filipino troops captured by the Japanese. He endured the Bataan Death March, then years of brutal captivity.

He saw men beheaded because they were too weak to walk. He saw a Japanese tank swerve to run over a man who had fallen down.

The memories were so bad, his wife told me, that even as late as the 1970s, a bowl of rice placed on the table in front of him would make him vomit.

It has been written the only thing that keeps soldiers from deserting en mass is the subconscious conviction that they will survive, that it will be “the other guy” who dies.

Not always. A few battles during the Civil War were so bloody that Union soldiers ordered to charge paused to write their names on slips of paper which were pinned to the backs of their uniforms. It happened at Cold Harbor, Va., in 1864.

A small church cemetery near that battlefield holds the remains of many Union soldiers. One large monument is inscribed with the information that beneath it lie hundreds of the dead who could not be identified.

Just weeks before, the same troops had fought in The Wilderness, an area of tangled undergrowth and trees. They had to endure the cries of scores of wounded comrades who burned to death in fires started by exploding shells.

It has been written that most American troops who died in World War I succumbed not to enemy shells or bullets, but to sickness.

West Virginia Frank Buckles, who happened to be the last American survivor of the Great War, explained the terror. One evening, he said, he lay down on his cot just inches from where a fellow soldier was sleeping. The man was perfectly normal.

When Buckles awoke the next morning, the man beside him was dead of the flu.

“War is hell,” Civil War Gen. William Sherman said.

Today, we ought to think about that.

Myer can be reached at: mmyer@theintelligencer.net.

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