War Stories

Los Angeles

By Andrea Scarpino

Often, now, on important days related to World War II like this weekend’s D-Day, a local Utica journalist contacts my Uncle Lindy to ask him about fighting in a tank division during the war. Usually, Uncle Lindy tells the journalist he lied about his age to join the army early, about the sounds he heard while landing on the D-Day beaches, about what it was like to pass German soldiers while on patrol at night and just nod his head in their direction, no shots fired by either side. The story journalists like the best is about a concentration camp survivor Uncle Lindy met after helping to liberate his camp. Lindy gave him a cigarette and always remembered his face. Years later, in upstate New York, that same man walked into the grocery store Lindy owned with his brothers. The two recognized each other immediately, cried and hugged, and became the best of friends for the remaining decades of the camp survivor’s life.

But when I think of D-Day, part of an honorable war, I think about how Uncle Lindy kept his war stories secret for forty years. He returned from the army after war’s end, after seeing his friends killed right next to him as a 17, 18, 19 year-old man, and opened a grocery store, got married, raised a family. For decades and decades, he didn’t tell his wife or closest friends about everything he had seen.

Maybe ten years ago, he visited my father, his brother-in-law, and brought some of his war memorabilia to share. In my father’s living room, he unrolled an enormous Nazi flag that he had taken from the side of a school in Germany, showed us Nazi medals he had taken from the bodies of dead soldiers, kept wrapped in bolts of cloth. My father, who had known Lindy for the better part of fifty years, had never seen these items before, had never before heard Lindy’s war stories. Even now, when he talks about the war that ended more than sixty years ago, Lindy will sit at the kitchen table and cry. Even now, even sixty years later, what he witnessed and remembers still brings him to tears. And this was an honorable war.

When I thought about D-Day this weekend, I couldn’t help thinking of all the soldiers returning from Iraq who have seen worse than Lindy could have imagined, who have worse injuries, who will live the rest of their lives with disabilities our medical systems and public spaces aren’t equipped to support, who will live the rest of their lives with psychological trauma, with terrible, terrible memories.

And this, to me, is the biggest tragedy of the Bush administration: that hundreds of thousands of American soldiers, Iraqi soldiers, Iraqi civilians—hundreds of thousands of people have been irrevocably changed by what they’ve seen and done and heard as a result of a war many people now understand as needless, unwarranted. The opposite of honorable. I can’t even begin to imagine how many years this trauma will reverberate in families of American soldiers, in families of Iraqis.

So on this D-Day, I grieved for my Uncle Lindy, for all that he’s suffered these sixty-odd years, but also for all who have fought in our current wars, whose lives are only beginning to be shaped by what they’ve seen.

Andrea Scarpino is the west coast Bureau Chief of POTB. You can visit her at: www.andreascarpino.com

Author: stevekuusisto

Poet, Essayist, Blogger, Journalist, Memoirist, Disability Rights Advocate, Public Speaker, Professor, Syracuse University View all posts by stevekuusisto