Tuesday, May 8, 1945: I woke that day a free man, happy beyond belief to be home in America, home in a small house near railroad tracks at the back end of a small city, safe in a tiny, old building that still had no running water or bathroom, but to me was paradise. Not quite a year before, I had jumped from a plane in the wee hours of the morning and landed in the middle of the biggest war mankind has ever known. I’d crashed off target but gotten on with things, helping securing the bridgehead into France.
Many things had happened after that. Horrible things. But in the end, I’d survived.
Now, this morning, May 8, someone was shouting outside—a newsboy hawking papers.
“War is over!” he yelled. “VE Day.”
VE Day.
Victory in Europe.
He was wrong. World War II wasn’t quite over. We were still fighting the Japanese in the Pacific. But the mistake was understandable. He was excited, and we were all excited. The Germans had surrendered. Adolf Hitler was dead. The bigger part of the conflict was finished. The evil the Nazis had unleashed—evil I’d seen and experienced—had been vanquished. It cost trillions of dollars and countless lives, but it had to be done. Whatever it took, it had to be done.
I stepped outside our little house. Church bells were ringing. Cars beeped. Children and grown men and women played and wept in the streets.
I’d known the war would end for weeks, but still I felt some surprise. Over. It was really over.
Was it? What had happened seemed like a nightmare that had no ending.
I started walking across town, toward my fiancée’s home. If I was going to celebrate, it had to be with her.
When we’d met, I was just a teenage child. Now I was a man, a man who’d been to war.
A man who had fought in the hedgerows of France, been shot by a tank, taken prisoner, and interred in a camp where the intent was to work you to death.
A man who had seen the very worst things human beings could do to each other. Who had stood next to the fence of a Nazi death camp and watched the bodies of gassed Jews as they were piled up, then carted away to be burned.
Surviving the war meant living on sawdust and beet juice for months, shivering in a thin blanket in weather so cold your sweat froze. It took beatings so harsh you thought your skull would cave in.
It took choosing almost certain quick death over almost certain slow death.
It took desperate acts behind enemy lines.
I had learned many things in the year and a half since I’d joined the Army. I learned how to fall out of planes and land without breaking my neck or wrenching my knee. I learned how to blow up bridges, and detect booby traps and mines.
I learned how to navigate in the dark, using stars and dead reckoning. I learned how to survive behind enemy lines, where everyone wants you dead, or worse.
I learned how to kill, and how not to look too deeply into the eyes of the man you shot, for fear of seeing your reflection.
I learned how to become a savage.
I learned how very dark a man’s soul can become when he wills himself to survive.
Desperation, hunger, vengeance, and most of all my training as a paratrooper with the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne made me a fierce warrior—but a reluctant one. Under other circumstances, maybe, I could have been friends with some of the people I had to shoot. But I’d been in a place where I had no friends, and where everyone I met carried my death sentence, no matter how kind their glance seemed.
I tried putting all of that out of my mind as I walked. Today was not a day for deep reflection. Today was a day to celebrate.
VE Day. The war in Europe was over.