Beech Tree News Network

When I was in third grade, Danny Burkhead lived just down the road from us on Markwell Lane, in Bullitt County.  He was a quiet, mind-your-own-business kind of guy.  His parents were quiet, simple people, as well.  My sisters and I rode the bus with Danny. When he graduated from Mt. Washington High School, he was immediately drafted and sent straight to Viet Nam.  He didn’t survive the year.  Danny Burkhead was my first brush with war.
    My stepmother’s first husband served under General Patton’s command during WWII.  (He survived the war, but drowned in a boating accident right before my stepsister was born.)  When I was in fifth grade, she pulled an aged hardback book from her cedar chest and handed it to me.  The images in that book included photos of the Holocaust victims the Americans came upon when they marched into Hitler’s death camps.  I don’t know where she got the book.  I don’t know if she still has it.  If she does still have it, I don’t know if I could bear to look at those pictures again.
    It seems the history of every country is defined by pre-war and post-war eras.  The reasons for war are explained in detail in high school and college course textbooks.  Country “A” does so-in-so and Country “B” reacts.  There are serious infractions, as in the atrocities inflicted upon the Jews.   At other times, reading about warring factions is like listening to kids in the back seat of a car: “She looked at me; He hit me; She started it!”  The reasons are as asinine.
    Last week, I visited the WWII Museum in New Orleans.  There was a veteran sitting at a table near the entrance.  He was a marine who had been part of the fight on Iwo Jima.  There was a crowd gathered around him, listening to his story.  He arranged the thumb and index finger on his right hand to simulate a gun.  “They were messing with the wrong guys,” he said.  I was about to see how right he was. 
    In the museum are dozens of small kiosks.  In each kiosk, there are video accounts of four separate veterans.  They tell their stories in their own words.  I could have stayed in that area all day, and nearly did.  I listened to soldiers from every branch of the military.  The most heart-breaking accounts are from the soldiers who landed on Omaha Beach and Utah Beach on D-Day. 
    Before the gates opened on those Higgins boats, the guys were told to keep pressing forward, no matter what was going on around them.  Of course, the minute they emerged from the boats, they were met with automatic weapons fire from machine gun nests set up by the Germans as part of their Atlantic Wall Offensive.  The men who survived were literally wading through body parts floating all around them as they fought their way onto the shores of Normandy. 
    D-Day was a joint offensive by the U.S., Great Britain and Canada, known as “Operation Overlord.”  One American pilot remarked there were so many sips in the Atlantic that day, from his vantage point, it seemed as if you could walk across the ocean by stepping from one ship to another. I listened to a German soldier’s account of what he saw from atop his machine gun nest.  He said when he and his fellow soldiers saw the great fleet of ships coming at them, they couldn’t believe what they saw.  “We didn’t know there were that many ships in the whole world!” he said.
    The Higgins boats that ferried the soldiers to shore on D-Day were designed by Andrew Jackson Higgins of Louisiana.  One of the boats sits at the entrance of the museum with a plaque that explains the reason for building the WWII Museum in New Orleans is because of this small boat’s part in helping to win the war.  The craft Higgins designed was called the LCVP (Landing Craft, Vehicle & Personnel).  Colonel Joseph H. Alexander (USMC Ret.) said, “The Higgins boats broke the gridlock on the ship-to-shore movement.  It is impossible to overstate the tactical advantages this craft gave U.S. amphibious commanders in WWII.”
    I left the museum with the same question I ask after I finish a book on war: Why?  Most of the soldiers of war don’t have the luxury of mulling over the question.  They are too busy trying to stay alive while in the heat of battle and too busy trying to keep their sanity after it’s over. 
    My Grandma Mattingly’s oldest son, my uncle Thomas, was killed during WWII.  I never knew him, but I felt the effect of his death on my grandmother when I was just a little girl.  He was killed in Germany and buried in the Henri-Chapelle American Cemetery in Belgium with 7,991 other soldiers of that war.  Like many other mothers of sons who died in war, my grandmother didn’t even get to bury her son.  He was part of the collective carnage.  Years ago, I penned the following words in tribute:
        There are a hundred white crosses in a row on foreign soil,
        A dying memorial to human turmoil.
        Front row and center lies a private, first class.
        To the world another casualty,
        To his mama…Thomas.