"Hogan's Heroes" it Wasn't

My late father was in the U.S. Army's 86th Infantry division during World War II. The division entered Germany in March of 1945 and fought in various engagements, advancing all the way to Mattsee, Austria, where they captured the crown jewels of Hungary. But when my father spoke of the war, he stressed not the glory of victory but the grotesque nature of armed conflict.

He crossed the Rhine not long after his 19th birthday and saw that the river was full of graying, bloated corpses. His platoon took machine gun fire from emplacements manned by 12-year-old boys and elderly men. There was a horrible "friendly fire" death in his company when a G.I. returning from a night patrol thought it would be fun to hide in some bushes and practice his high school German with the company sentry. A mean redneck in his platoon would throw packets of chewing tobacco to children who asked for chocolate. German prisoners would weep during processing and beg that their watches and wedding rings not be stolen.

News traveled slowly in the chaos of battle, and one day in April of 1945, a Catholic chaplain informed my father that his brother Jimmy, a sergeant in the 4th Armored Division, had been killed in February near Bastogne, Belgium. My father became both despondent and angry, and he destroyed the one souvenir he had planned to bring home, a little doll dressed like a Wehrmacht soldier.

"I wanted to hate the Germans after that," he once told me. "But after I saw what the war did to German kids, I just thought that it was all one sad deal. Little German kids, the only way they knew to play was to march around in formation. You didn't see little girls playing with dolls, or boys playing ball. It was all military."

The division left Europe in June of 1945 and went to the Philippines later in the year, arriving just as the Japanese surrendered. My father said that he and his comrades received combat pay because there were nationalist guerrillas in the hills around their base, but that, "They never fired a shot, so we just ate bananas and went bowling." He made it sound like an army version of "McHale's Navy," which is the sort of mercy I wish for every person who is caught in the absurdity of war.