One night during our post-Katrina exile, in the Central Louisiana town of Marksville, we were having dinner at the Paragon Casino.
New Orleanians were dispersed across the region in those days as they wondered when and if they could return home soon, and what they would find once they got there.
A man, one of our fellow refugees, walked up and introduced himself. He had a story to tell. Oh, what a story! On this the week of Memorial Day, such stories come to mind.
Growing up I had heard many recollections from by dad who was with the Army in Europe during the big war. One story was about resting in the shade of a tree in France talking with a fellow soldier who happened to be from Avoyelles Parish. That’s where my dad was from and also the parish seat of Marksville where we happened to be that evening.
Those two weary soldiers must have had lots of memories and common acquaintances to share in the shade of a distant battlefield but then something horrible happened. A Nazi mortar shell blasted into the tree severing it limbs and shooting them, like missiles, into whatever happened to be around. The blast temporarily left my father unconscious. When he recovered, his friend’s body laid nearby, another bloodied casualty of the war.
Because of military censorship guidelines, soldiers were not allowed to mention new fatalities when they wrote home. My father would recall pretending in a letter that the news was already known by referring to his friend and then adding, “I guess you were as surprised by the news of his death as I was.”
Now, sitting across the table from me at a casino approximately 62 years later was a man from New Orleans’ West Bank who told me that it was his brother that was killed beneath the tree. As a kid he would have heard the heartbreaking news from my father’s letter home.
Other than full appreciation for the man’s insightfulness, this was a difficult moment for response. I was grateful to make the acquaintance, but if only that mortar shell in France had been a few inches off target the man could have experienced his brother for life. Or a few inches in a different direction, I might not have ever existed.
In December of ’44, during what would become known as the Battle of the Bulge, one of my father’s legs was severely damaged by the freeze during one of the harshest winters in European history. He survived and through the years would get to recall that heralded hour in 1945 when, while in a Belgian hospital, patients cheered as a trumpet echoed the “Star Spangled Banner” to signal that the war in Europe was over.
If only my father’s friend could have shared the moment. Blessed are those who have faced life’s battles and gotten to go home.
—30—
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