I have an old letter with a passage that haunts me, especially around Veterans Day or Memorial Day.
It’s addressed to my maternal grandfather, written January 3, 1945, on thin stationery from The Brown Hotel in Louisville, Kentucky.
A man named Hudson wrote: “I’m going along pretty well – quite used to being a civilian now – I love it! I thought when we were all at Anzio that I would never be one – guess I wasn’t the only one who thought that.”
“Anzio” refers to the Battle of Anzio, a brutal months-long battle in Italy that lasted from late January to early June 1944, aimed at bypassing German defenses and advancing toward Rome.
After the initial landing by Allied forces, German commanders counterattacked, taking advantage of the Allied decision to consolidate troops and resources instead of seizing their momentum and pushing further inland. For months, German artillery and air attacks pummeled the Allied Forces at the beachhead where they had come ashore until reinforcements arrived in late May 1944. A couple of weeks later, they liberated Rome.
Allied troops suffered tens of thousands of combat and non-combat casualties at Anzio. My grandpa helped bury some of the dead. As a staff sergeant for the Quartermaster Corps’ Graves Registration Service (now called Mortuary Affairs), he was tasked with soul-crushing work.
“The GRS in World War II were not only responsible for collecting, identifying, and burying the Soldier Dead, but also handling personal effects,” according to an article on the World War 2 History Short Stories blog, which states that the work was done for health and troop morale purposes. “The men had a system by which they worked on the stripping line to handle effects so they would be returned to the owner’s family.”
My grandpa, who died in 2007, must have been pretty good at his work. He received the Bronze Star for “meritorious service in direct support of combat operations from January 1944 to 15 April 1945, in Italy and France,” according to a citation I have, printed on thin parchment-like paper.
I have the actual medal, too. His name is inscribed in the center, wreathed by the words “Heroic or meritorious achievement.”
I didn’t know about Anzio or the Bronze Star or a wartime friend haunted by battle until well after my grandfather died. I knew he gathered the fallen after battles and wrote to their families, but that was information imparted by my parents.
Not him. He wouldn’t talk about any of it. He stayed silent about the hellscape he crossed, the men he laid to rest.
Instead, he drew pictures of fire engines as I perched on his knee. He made treasure hunts with maps and clues and buried the goods among the cacti and desert earth behind his Arizona townhome. He ate grapefruit every morning and frequently shared his food, encouraging me to try bites of dishes I’d never had before.
He was a grandpa, someone I knew and loved for less than 25% of his life. It wasn’t until a year or two after his death and inheriting a box of his letters and other various belongings that I started viewing his existence as one profoundly shaped by his wartime years.
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For a while, that knowledge was on my mind a lot.
When I worked as a reporter at the Klamath Falls Herald & News back in 2008-09, I took on a massive storytelling project where I used area veterans’ wartime letters to wrap stories around. It was wholly inspired by my grandpa. He never spoke about what he experienced, so I sought out those who would.
One of the most memorable was Ralph Kesling, a B-17 bubble gunner who was shot down over Germany and remained there as a prisoner of war for two years. Ralph would later invite me to join him on a flight aboard another B-17 maintained by the Commemorative Air Force nonprofit group. It was louder than a metal concert and seemed to crave turbulence, but I wish I could go again someday.
Ralph died in 2016. I can still hear his voice in my head, the rhythm he adopted while reciting poetry he’d written and memorized for his wife.
Sometimes, I wished my grandpa had been similarly candid, equally open, in describing his stories. Not that I didn’t understand or empathize. His mission was the dead, and only the dead. If I’m honest with myself, I don’t know how eloquently I could talk about such memories either.
Talking to Ralph and so many others also informed the enormity of the echoes they carried with them decades later. Not just combat, but service overall.
Those echoes are going silent, and fast.
Ralph and my grandpa were among the more than 16 million Americans who served in the U.S. Armed Forces during World War II, with more than 400,000 of them dying during the conflict. As of last year, the number of those who made it home and were still living had plunged significantly.
As of late 2023, 100,000 WWII Veterans were still alive, including about 6,000 women, an article on the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs says. In a decade, that number is expected to fall to about 1,000.
Meaning, of course, that there will be none in the not-too-distant future. Only stories, memories, and artifacts like my grandpa’s Bronze Star – and a man named Hudson’s letter – will remain.
“Walking the battlefields at Anzio and Arnhem, Salerno and the Bulge, and listening to veterans recount their tales made two things clear: this was the greatest story of the twentieth century, and like all great stories, it was bottomless,” author and historian Rick Atkinson writes in his book An Army At Dawn.
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So what do I do with that, knowing as little as I do? I have letters, artifacts, and other materials that I could meticulously go through. There are other family members whose brains I could pick, public records I could peruse. There are ways to assemble this puzzle.
But maybe I shouldn’t.
I think it comes down to this: these men and women who have made the decision to serve and sacrifice for this country of ours – warts and all – are not a monolith. We, of course, have plenty of personal accounts and academic history of this conflict and others. You can check out some of the ones we have in our collection — a mix of my personal favorites and others that are on top of my to-be-read pile — on this booklist. We have stories like Ralph’s in ample supply, both written and unwritten.
But with my grandpa, the best way to honor him is to maintain his methods. To acknowledge his service, meritorious as it was, but to understand that he wanted it kept quieter. His wartime experiences shaped him and so many others, but my grandpa, this former staff sergeant who buried the dead and was honored ceremoniously for it, kept his experiences mostly locked away because that was what he deemed best. I can speculate on the reasons all day long, but I’ll never know.
Why isn’t important anymore. Sometimes, stories are for everyone, and sometimes, they’re just for us.
I’ll just continue to remember my grandpa fondly for what I know, what I remember. His mission was me, and like his time in the military, he filled that role dutifully and warmly.
He deserves a whole other Bronze Star, one I think he’d wear all the time.
Thank you for your service, grandpa. And thank you for being my grandpa.