Veteran's Day: More WWII Memories

In a few weeks it will be Veteran’s Day.
A day for all to remember and honor those who paid the ultimate price exacted by freedom.
A day to weep for the evil among us that chooses war rather than peace, that chooses to destroy life rather than to make it flourish.
And a day to pray that “war may be no more,” and that peacemakers may be blessed.
***
One day the young boy saw planes falling out of the sky. And bodies falling out of the plane. Because there was war in the sky too.
Dozens of bombers were flying high overhead, escort planes circling around them constantly like sheepdogs.
Then he saw the German planes suddenly appear out of nowhere and racing fast to get to the bombers before they’d be spotted. Three got tangled up into dogfights with Allied planes before they could penetrate.
He stood there, hardly breathing, as he watched the planes chasing each other, like a dog chasing a rabbit, shooting at each other, and then one got hit and there was smoke and the plane came tumbling out of the sky and he saw a parachute come floating down too.
But then he watched with horror as two enemy fighter planes got to a straggling bomber. The bomber crew didn’t have a chance.
He saw puffs of smoke and the bomber went out of control and no parachutes came out and the plane looked like it was going to come down right on top of him and two other bombers now were hit too and hurtling down, and he stood frozen to the spot as the first plane plunged into the ground less than a mile away.
Twelve Allied Air Force soldiers were buried in the churchyard of his town.
***
Years later the boy, now adult, visited Margraten in the southern part of the Netherlands.
He walked among the 8300 American soldiers who lie buried there, young vibrant lives cut down by a crazed enemy that sought to destroy the freedom of others.
He wept for those lost lives and their loved ones who never held them again.

And then he remembered the young boy who one day after the war, on his way home from school, encountered an old white-bearded gentleman walking toward him, asking directions to the cemetery to visit his son’s grave.
And he remembered the belt buckle he had found in the burned-out wreckage of the airplane that he and his friends sneaked into when the German guards weren’t looking.
He had kept it for a long time. And every time he had held it in his hands, he remembered the feeling and the smell of death inside that ruined hulk.

For that’s what war is all about: death.

Childhood Memories of WWII

I woke up that May-day morning
from intimations of immortality
to the sounds and sin of World War II.

Behind me were five years of hazy bliss
of much innocence and memories few,
before me lay five years of fear
and a life-time of experience
whose recollections have the power
to haunt me still this year.

I remember now the bright-blue, spring-sprung sky
smeared suddenly with swastikas on gleaming wings,
the angry droning of a thousand warplanes
silencing the sounds of music from hedge and trees.

I remember now that father prayed that day
for God to help us all, to save our land.
But Hitler’s mighty forces had their way.
My little world became unsafe, and fear
moved in, a pallid and unwanted resident.

I remember now the man wanted alive or dead
for whom we made a hiding place.
One day the Germans came to cross our land.
My friend and I stood watching through the glass
when I saw a strange expression on his face,
when I saw a revolver in his hand,
to shoot himself, I wondered, or the enemy?
The soldiers skipped our door, thank God,
but I was terrified.

I remember now my mother on her bicycle,
side bags bulging with papers from the underground
she would deliver on her special paper route
while I feared constantly that she’d be caught
and we would never see her face again.

I remember now the deadly dogfights in the air,
the Allied bombers smoking, hurtling down
so close to us, I thought we would get hit.

Later friends and I sneaked inside the burned-out hulk,
where I smelled death of the 12-men crew,
found buttons, belt-buckles, a first-aid kit,
a half-burned boot, mementos of the men
who were buried in the village churchyard
far from their native soil.

I remember now the power of the flying bomb,
the German V-twos sent to London
as a hoped-for coup d’état.
This one fell not far from us
and left a crater deep and wide
enough to drop a house in.

I remember now the protest day when
farmers spilled their milk upon the ground
instead of shipping to the factory.
And Germans eager to retaliate
grabbed some townsfolk here and there,
and lined them up; they were shot and killed,
all sixteen of them, execution-style, then
thrown into a mass grave, as of no account.
One was a boy only four years older than I was.

I remember now on liberation day
when the forces of the underground
came to pick up collaborators with the enemy,
including dad and son whose land lay next to us.
When these refused to come outside,
their captors tossed a hand grenade.
Then they went in and found
the father dead with a bullet in his head,
the mother dead from the hand grenade,
only the wounded son survived; his hands were bound,
and then he stood before the crowd
whose wartime anger, long pent up,
was now unleashed; some slapped his face,
others spat upon him, all taunted him
who had just lost his dad and mom;
and these were good Christian folk.

I remember now the day
I met a man from far away,
walking down the main street of our town;
his hair was thin and white, his beard was long.
He asked how he might find the way
to the gravesite of his only son.
I showed him where the churchyard was,
but I did not invite him home with me,
I did not seat him in our best chair,
find the prettiest cup and saucer on the shelf
and make some tea for him.
I did not invite all the war’s survivors
of the town to come and thank this man,
thank this broken father for what his son had done;
for I was too young then and did not think of that.
But I would like to thank him now,
and all the others who gave more
than what we ever have a right to ask.

We learned while very young
that there is evil in the human heart;
the dreams of innocence were shattered,
we always looked through broken glass.
Even after 70 years, our vision has not been restored.
For some there’s only hope, grounded in faith,
that there will be a day, when face to face
we will know as we are known,
and shalom will have come at last.

Summer Beauty in the Mountains

This memory goes back to a mid-summer day in July.
I still hear the words:
“Dad, when I die I want to be buried here.”

She startled me out of my reverie that summer day, high up in the Cascades.
I turned to her and saw a vigorous, vital youngster full of the spice of life.
But her thoughtful face expressed a peace and wisdom far beyond her nine years.

Our family had hiked up a mountain trail.
We had come as strangers,
our ears tuned to the sounds of cars and commerce,
our eyes trained to spot traffic signs.
But nature slowly embraced and re-educated us.
As we moved away from the din of highways, we began to listen to the sounds of birds calling to birds,
of woodpeckers drumming on dead trees,
of water sometimes trickling and flowing down like lace,
sometimes rushing and leaping out boldly into space,
shattering upon rocks below in a rainbow spray.
We began to note the variegated shades of barks and ferns,
the spirea growing in the underwood,
the occasional canopies of devil’s club and clusters of columbine.
We began to smell the forest scents of stately firs and decaying plant life.
And we began to walk more softly through a hushed cathedral of evergreens,
to speak more softly,
till at last we were quiet altogether,
yielding to the peace and silence all around us.

When we reached the edge of trees and ferns, we saw before us at some distance the snowfields rising to a flattened dome.
Though we were surely not mountain climbers,
there, above the shadows of forests and sounds of tumbling streams,
face to face with a mountain,
we felt something of the mountaineer’s wordless exhilaration.

Another trail invited us to climb higher, and soon we came upon a scene that took our breath away:
we had reached the alpine meadows,
a gentle slope ablaze with colorful drifts of wild flowers and heather,
dotted with patches of lingering snow.
We stood in the presence of great beauty,
inside a garden of our Father’s world,
where we felt the awesome mystery and majesty of God Himself.

There in the mountain meadows,
a place of tranquility among rugged mountain peaks and hanging glaciers,
a profound silence wrapped around our souls.
And in that silence, the voice of God spoke:
of the foolishness of pride,
of the insensitivity to the invisible relationship between self and nature,
of the propensity to let the world be too much with us and within us.
And, at the foot of a mighty mountain,
it spoke to us of time and the frailty and transience of human life.
But the voice induced no fear, only conviction and serenity.

The thought of death, too, held no terror.
Perhaps death terrifies most when we feel most distant from the essence of life,
when we are most preoccupied with the trivial,
when we are most alienated from the mystery and majesty of God,
when we are most inattentive to the creative forces that make mountains and wild flowers,
when we are most resistant to God’s Spirit which, in Christ, would make us new.

But here we experienced the voice of Him who says:
“Be still and know that I am God.”
And that voice filled us with peace and awe.

My daughter and I looked at each other.
Then she looked away, at nature’s profusion around us, and she said again,
“I’d like to be buried here when I die.”

And I knew what she meant.

Unbroken

I grew up in WW II, the enemy and its readiness to kill in view nearly every day.

Maybe that explains my life-long interest in war literature and film, each well-crafted tale reinforcing and deepening my revulsion to war.
War, I’m convinced, must have all the devils dancing in hell with glee, confident that it will turn many a warrior into a devil too.
 
No book has brought that home to me as painfully and unforgettably as did Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand.

Were it fiction, it would still have been a memorable read, though I would’ve dismissed some characters and events as simply too incredible.  But it is fact, and fact, we know, is sometimes stranger than fiction. In this case, it took me into the heart of darkness so relentlessly and graphically that I could hardly disentangle myself from its terrors between readings.

 
Yes, war is about death-defying acts of courage.  About giving one’s life for another. But also about taking a life from another. About danger and fear so unremitting and intense that it can inflict life-long psychic damage. About demonic acts of cruelty that destroy one’s dignity and break the human spirit.  

More than anything, of course, war is about people. Like Louis Zamperini, an Olympic long-distance runner, becoming a long-distance bombardier in the war against Japan.  If it’s possible for one to die many deaths, Louie does: on bombing missions, crashing into the vast Pacific, drifting in a leaky raft for nearly fifty days, falling into the brutal hands of Japanese prison guards who inflicted daily beatings and torture and near starvation.

But somehow Louie survives, in a badly damaged body, and with a plague of horrific memories that unravel his spirit.  His descent into the depths of inhumanity has been too steep and prolonged. Neither the adulation of the nation, nor the love of family, nor the love of a beautiful wife can put Louis Zamperini together again. 

Only the love of God can – and does.  Profound and inexplicable. And unforgettable. As it always is when grace makes its amazing entry.

At the end, this reader, too, felt blessed.

Beyond Expectation

Now that he has risen,
our eyes can conquer
fear.

Raise heads
and with the trees
reach out a hand.

It will come soon:
in windlessness and fire,
birds over land,
an almighty Dove.

Wait, and your voice
will be understood.

                  -Jan Dotinga
                    translated from Frisian -- hjb
                   

When a Daughter Marries

[Summer is a time when for many young lovers wedding bells ring.

It’s been a few years since our youngest daughter’s wedding feast.

And the weddings of her three older sisters are an even more distant memory.

But this is what I remember, now dedicated to all the parents who will be “giving their daughters away” this summer.]

(An awful phraseology, really, but that’s a topic for another time.)

When a daughter marries, you smile and laugh a lot.

Partly from tension, of course.

But mostly from relief.

For all the hurly-burly of the preceding months (Adam and Even never knew what they were missing) is at last culminating in a peaceful ceremony of beauty.

The families are there.

Friends have come.

The dresses all fit, and the colors complement.

The music is melodious and joyful.

Bride and groom are radiant.

The vows are spoken, and no spurned lover appears at the last moment to object.

You smile with relief: it’s going well (though much too quickly) now.

And you smile and laugh because this is a festive occasion – this is a wedding feast!

Though the wine doesn’t flow like it did in Cana, the spirits are high, the talk is animated, and currents of warm affection float everywhere. 

The Creator’s gracious gift of love is celebrated!

But there’s another reason you smile and laugh a lot: you try to cover up.

For when a daughter marries, what you really want to do is cry a little.

You try not to, of course, for fathers don’t cry.

So they smile and laugh a lot.
But she’s flesh of your flesh, after all, and after all these years rather firmly attached.

And it hurts to part with what is part of you, to let go, to let your flesh unite with other flesh.

But it is the way of love: for man and woman to leave father and mother and to cleave unto each other.

God made it so, and it is right and it is beautiful.

And therefore parents say Amen to it; in fact, they would have it no other way.

Still, even the most beautiful things can hurt a little.

Maybe it’s especially the beautiful things that make you cry.

There’s something else you do when a daughter marries: through your smile and through your tears you breathe a prayer.

Up to this moment, bride and groom have experienced the delights and frustrations of romance: tomorrow their history of husband and wife will begin.

You breathe a prayer of thanks that it will begin in the Lord.

For in our time, marriage is a fragile institution.

The strains and tensions of this age wreak their havoc all too often.

God’s children are subject to that too, for they too are vulnerable.

Life can get messy; and marriage is part of that life.

That’s why you pray for a union that will be steadily sustained by the grace of God.

And in George Eliot’s words, you pray that this young couple may be joined for life:

“to strengthen each other in all labor,

to rest on each other in all sorrow,

to minister to each other in all pain,

to be one with each other in the silent, unspeakable memories at the moment of last parting.”

The Merry Month of May

If I were a poet, May would have been a busy month.

A poet, we know, is irresistibly moved by the mysterious muse

to express the inexpressible.
To find words for feelings that lie too deep for thought.

And the month of May often fills the heart.

If I were a poet my pen would have caught the transient,

fragile beauty of the flowering crab, “where the bee sucks,”

and whose pink-red petals dazzle my every May.

If I were a poet I would have celebrated in un-Hallmarkian verse

my brother’s birthday and all those days and ways

in which, as close friends, we spent time in gut-aching laughter,

serious thought, stimulating talk, and mutual affection.

If I were a poet I would have found on Mothers Day

true words of thanks for all the caring and sharing

and praying and self-giving of good mothers everywhere.

If I were a poet I would have captured through imagery

and sound and rhythm the many feelings of my heart and

my spirit’s prayer on our daughter’s birthday, who lives

her life more than 2000 miles away.

If I were a poet I would have composed a dozen sestinas

for all those who, capped and gowned, in pomp

and circumstance, celebrate a cerebral siesta after much

hard learning and weariness of the flesh. 

If I were a poet I would have exclaimed in psalms and hymns

and holy sonnets the glorious mystery, truth, and power

of Ascension, and Pentecost to follow. 

Even then, I doubt that I could have struck the human spirit

with the fullness of the awesome wonder those two events entail.

And if I were a poet I would memorialize the lives

sacrificed in too many wars.

I would in graphic detail depict the sins of slaughter,

the price of freedom, the specter of mass death. 

My conscious memory began with war, ironically

in the May time of the year. 

Those memories, mild as they are, still have the power to haunt. 

If I were a poet I would poignantly pen my pleas and prayers for peace.

But I’m not a poet. 

Still, May was busy anyway. 

And now, at Merry May’s end, I am content to sit

under pale moonlight and “let the sounds of music creep in my years:

soft stillness in the night…the touches of sweet harmony.”
For something as “full of the spirit as the month of May,”

we need a Shakespeare.

Now, there’s a poet!