In the beginning were stories of selflessness and indomitable character. My friend, Randy LeCocq, sometimes called Magoo, and I included some of those stories in our book, The Battle Of The Bulge, A Montana Perspective. Certain there were more stories, we decided to take our little book on the road. We scheduled nine, two-hour meetings in public libraries around our state to tell others what we had learned. It seems few think of World War II (WWII) now. Most who were in it and experienced horrific events have now died. Those who were left at home struggled with too small of a labor force and severe shortages of equipment and fuel. Few who experienced either aspect seemed to think they should have been the reporters of it, so it’s been largely forgotten. Children and grandchildren who might know a small piece of the story have moved away to other towns, states and countries. Newly arrived Montanans know a different history. Our country, no longer requiring mandatory national service, leaves people less likely to learn each other’s family stories. So, our first notion was that we’d be casting a beam of light into today’s darkness about Montana during WWII, but that expectation didn’t line up with what we encountered. As a people, we Montanans seem to have entered into a transitional phase between what was and what comes next. We are in a liminal space of not knowing. Our choice of inclinations, divided broadly into love and fear are what we have left to guide us.
In the issue of Harper’s Magazine that was on the newsstands during Magoo and my road show, my late friend Edwin Dobb eloquently crafted an essay he titled, “Nothing But Gifts.” I believe he spoke for most Montanans and most Americans in this moment. He asks, “What does it mean to choose to love?” Like myself toward the end of life, he had gained insights for responding to the perplexities of today’s living. As beneficiaries of everyone and everything that preceded us, the challenge lies in knowing whom we should thank and how. Those who came before us are all dead. In our indebtedness, rather than pursue somebody’s bloody notion of a past America or a future paradise, we are wise to thankfully construct our lives out of the range of available things and within the context of conditions we have been given. We overcome estrangement by caring, even by adopting others. We lessen power of the monstrous over us by reducing it to human scale. Quietly, by helping where we can, we build solidarity in the face of calamity because we are all in this together. When death comes, we hope for enough gracefulness among ourselves, families and friends to heal the opened remnants of our lives in a good way. These views, born of our shared Butte legacy where “no smoking” signs in underground mines had to be posted like trees in sixteen languages, clash with the “American fairy tale of self-sufficiency and solitary achievement, still dominant because of our country’s relative comfort, affluence, and insulation from prolonged, widespread horror.” Without requiring any effort or sacrifice, the alternative fairy tale feeds romantic notions of the West and of America as being exceptional, compared with all the other places occupied by peoples of this world. These fairy tales are self-built narratives hiding fear.
Those who live with fear seem to be facing the back wall of a cave, to which they’ve chained themselves, content to be entertained by shadows cast on the cave’s wall by puppeteers with the use of light coming from behind. One puppeteer, a Russian circus master with genius that American entertainer Michael Jackson said he sensed in Adolf Hitler, has a puppet that trumpets to his narrow fan-base self-aggrandizing assertions and comments demeaning of others. His crass theme, shared with Nationalists from England, Hungary, Israel and Italy, is that our most monstrous threats are not economic inequality, government tyranny or climate change but immigrants. These dime-a-dozen demagogues use fear as the sizzle that sells their bony political steaks, particularly where there exists a high penetration of Facebook users in their target populations. An air of debauchery in all their backgrounds hints at an even worse spectacle, had our whole world succumbed to such Nationalists (Nazis) in WWII. This story is not about those puppeteers.
This Gonzo Road Show Diary is about what we are capable of doing. Otherwise in this moment, if we allow fear to make the normal appear monstrous, we may be sitting astride the line between bounteous peace and horrible war, real war. In a Third World War (WWIII) the boundaries of nations will not be battle lines nor will the topography of our continents and seabeds be battlefields. Our hearts and our minds will have encounters in battlespace, where religion, skin color, language or military uniforms will not distinguish friends from foes. We must resist, not react, to the “suspicion, hatred and bigotry that has settled over large parts of America.” If we encourage those who intentionally perpetuate this climate, the eventual carnage will be horrible. It will be wiser to ignore the hysterical and deflate our common problems to human scale, addressing them one at a time as what comes next enters this liminal space. Hopefully, we will allow ourselves to be transformed.
This story reports my personal journey toward the cave’s opening by relating some of my thoughts stimulated by the focus of our road show, The Battle of the Bulge and WWII. In 1946 as this story begins, 359 military cemeteries around the world were trying to contain the remains of 286,959 American WWII dead. The number of identifiable remains was 246,942. Of the missing sets, 18,641 had been located. Of the located sets, 10,986 remains were placed in overseas military cemeteries and 7655 remains were left in isolated graves. The next year some of the relatives of the war dead wanted their loved ones brought back to the United States (U.S.) to be reburied in local or national cemeteries. That program was discontinued in the mid-1960s. By then, 171,000 bodies of dead Americans had been repatriated. This left 97,000 others, including 935 Montanans, near their places of death. These men and women were serving as one civilian, two merchant mariners, 32 marines, 191 sailors, 282 airmen and 427 soldiers. In total, they wear 4 Distinguished Service Crosses, 44 Silver Stars, 70 Bronze Stars, 3 Legion of Merit, 28 Distinguished Flying Crosses, 4 Navy Crosses, 312 Air Medals and 714 Purple Hearts. Among those still in military status overseas were U.S. Army Air Corps PVT Bill Gruber who died in the Bataan Death March, and PVT Bill Boegli of the 322nd Infantry Regiment, 81st Division killed in 1944 while evacuating fellow wounded soldiers from Angaur Island, east of the Philippines. Both were identified and returned to Montana in 2018.
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