Dream Catcher: A Memoir (13 page)

Major General R. O. Barton

U.S. Army Commanding

[p. 377 /AG 201.22]

While the “burden of neutralizing frantically defended enemy fortifications fell heavily on the
shoulders
of the foot soldier,” it fell even more heavily on their feet. The leather combat boots soaked up water in a thaw and froze solid in the cold nights. Waterproof, insulated L.L. Bean–type boots were available, but to the “everlasting disgrace of the quartermasters and all other rear-echelon personnel,” who were nearly all wearing them by mid-December, not until late January did the boots get to where they were needed. Three days before the Battle of the Bulge, a colonel of the Ninetieth Division noted that “every day more men are falling out due to trench foot . . . [they] can’t walk and are being carried from sheltered pillbox positions at night to firing positions in the day time.” During the winter of 1944–45, forty-five thousand men were taken off the front line because of trench foot.

My father said that no matter what, he will always be grateful to his mother, who knit him socks and sent them to him in the mail, each and every week, throughout the war. He told me it saved his life in the foxholes that winter; he was the only guy he knew with dry feet. “Saved my life”—I used to think this was in the same category of language as a well-fed American boy asking his mother what’s for supper and saying, “I’m starving.” I was too young to realize that there can be extreme situations in life where language is stripped of the cloak of hyperbole. Narrative breaks down and becomes the language of the body, a moan, a wrung breast, vacant eyes, living skeletons. I understand in many ways why the story “For Esmé” falls silent when it does. If one does recover language, it is not narrative with its Aristotelian wholeness of beginning, middle, and end; but rather, a poem—midway between a moan and a story—reflecting the shape of shards and fragments of life blown apart.

It was during that awful winter that Louise Bogan, poetry editor for
The New Yorker
during the war, wrote to William Maxwell telling him that “a young man, J. D. Salinger, has been bombarding me with poems for a week or so.”
¹⁷

As the poet Lord Byron wrote:

No words suffice the secret soul to show,

For truth denies all eloquence to woe.

—“The Corsair,”

Canto iii, Stanza 22, line 551

E
XHAUSTED FROM THE
T
ERRIBLE
H
ÜRTGEN
Forest, the Twelfth scarcely had a breath before it was once again in the thick of things in the defense of Luxembourg and the Battle of the Bulge.
¹⁸
So bad were the losses at Echternach that Salinger’s friends and family feared him dead or captured.
¹⁹
December 26 brought a call to Mrs. Salinger with the news that “Salinger is all right.”
²⁰
New Year’s Day, 1945, was Staff Sergeant Salinger’s twenty-sixth birthday. Of this day and the following three months, the division commander writes:

On those days, melting snow revealed the bodies of both German and American soldiers upon the ground where they had been frozen into weird shapes after they had fallen in the winter battles. Hundreds of dead cattle littered the fields and destroyed vehicles lined the roads along with the carcasses of the horses that had been used to pull enemy supply vehicles. Most of the small towns had been either partially or completely destroyed and the wreckage lay untouched where it fell. Human excreta was deposited in the corners of rooms where the fighting had been at such close quarters that even leaving the buildings was an invitation to death. This part of Germany, just north of the point where the borders of Germany, France and Belgium meet, was the filthiest area the 12
^th
had ever fought through.
²¹

In April, the Twelfth Infantry Regiment was assigned to “mopping up.” This meant, among other tasks, that all units picked up many prisoners of war in their areas and were constantly alert for resistance from small groups of bypassed enemy. (As a counter-intelligence agent, one of my father’s jobs was the interrogation and processing of POWs and suspects.)

The last action to be fought by the Twelfth Infantry Regiment in World War II took place May 2, 1945, between Company A and SS troops on Tegernsee. On May 5, the Twelfth Regiment opened its command post in Hermann Göring’s castle at Neuhaus. The area was secured, and the Twelfth began carrying out its occupation duties. Nazi civil authorities often fled the towns as the Allied forces moved in, and local government was in chaos. Thousands of liberated displaced persons, Allied prisoners of war, and German political prisoners posed a threat to the security of the captured areas, and counter-intelligence officers such as Staff Sergeant Salinger were kept extremely busy.

News of the German surrender reached them on May 8. On the fourteenth of May, the entire Fourth Infantry moved to an area west of Nürnberg in the general vicinity of Ansbach and continued its duties keeping order. Sometime during these next few weeks, my father was taken to a hospital just outside Nürnberg and admitted for battle fatigue. He wrote to Hemingway in July, making light of it, joking about the questions the psychiatrists asked him about his family life and background. What is clear in the letter is that he did take one thing seriously: he was adamant in his resolve to fight any attempt to give him a psychiatric rather than an honorable discharge. He was successful, and the army doctors sent him back to his duties a few weeks later.

A man should receive a medal of honor, I think, for holding off cracking up until after the war with the Eskimos.
²²
Sergeant X, too, held off cracking up until the battle was won. At the end of the war, he, like Sergeant Salinger, is newly released from a hospital. He is “a young man who has not come through the war with his faculties intact.” Both sergeants extended their stay after the armistice by signing a six-month civilian contract to help with the de-Nazification of Germany, bringing in suspected Nazis for interrogation and sentencing. Sergeant X is in his room, “and for more than an hour he had been triple-reading paragraphs,
and now he was doing it to the sentences.” He opens a book that belonged to a “low-level official in the Nazi Party, but high enough, by Army Regulations standards, to fall into an automatic-arrest category.”

X himself had arrested her. Now, for the third time since he had returned from the hospital that day, he opened the woman’s book and read the brief inscription on the flyleaf. Written in ink, in German, in small, hopelessly sincere handwriting, were the words “Dear God, life is hell.” Nothing led up to or away from it. Alone on the page, and in the sickly stillness of the room, the words appeared to have the stature of an uncontestable, even classic indictment. . . . [X] wrote down under the inscription, in English, “Fathers and teachers, I ponder ‘What is hell?’ I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.” He started to write Dostoevski’s name under the inscription, but saw—with fright that ran through his whole body—that what he had written was almost entirely illegible. He shut the book.

The change in my father’s handwriting in the letters (which I read in the Library of Congress collection) he wrote to friends and family stateside after his release from the hospital at Nürnberg is truly spooky. His handwriting, almost as distinctive and familiar to me as his face, becomes something
totally
unrecognizable.

Sergeant X’s friend, Corporal Z, who like John Keenan, was his “Jeep partner and constant companion” throughout the war, comes in the room. He notices that X’s face is jumping and twitching. Z tells him that he wrote to his girl back home, a psychology major, and told her that X had had a nervous breakdown.

“You know what she said? She says nobody gets a nervous breakdown just from the war and all. She says you probably were unstable like, your whole goddam life.”

X bridged his hands over his eyes—the light over the bed seemed to be blinding him—and said that Loretta’s insight into things was always a joy.

Later, alone, he thinks that there “might be some quick, however slight, therapy in it” to write a letter to an old friend in New York, but his fingers shake so violently he can’t roll a sheet of paper into his typewriter. He knows he should get the vomity wastebasket out of the room, but instead puts his head down and closes his eyes sleeplessly. “A few throbbing minutes later” he opens his eyes and notices a letter he hasn’t opened. It is from Esmé, the young girl he had met in England. It’s a lovely, plain letter much like the one Mattie wrote to Babe, or the girl in Belgium wrote to “Family Bill.” The story ends:

He just sat with it in his hand for another long period. Then, suddenly, almost ecstatically, he felt sleepy.

You take a really sleepy man, Esmé, and he
al
ways stands a chance of again becoming a man with all his fac—with all his f-a-c-u-l-t-i-e-s intact.

1
.
Zooey,
p. 140.

2
. “Last Day of the Last Furlough,”
Saturday Evening Post,
July 15, 1944, p. 26.

3
. When it appeared in the April 13, 1944, issue of the
Saturday Evening Post,
the editors had taken it upon themselves to change the title from “Death of a Dogface” to “Soft-Boiled Sergeant.” You can imagine how pleased he was about that—and the Norman Rockwell–like drawings that accompanied the story. But a young writer has no control over these things, as my father would, later, when his reputation was established.

4
. “Wake Me When it Thunders” (renamed “Both Parties Concerned” by the
Saturday Evening Post,
February 26, 1944), came out a few months before “Death of a Dogface.”

5
.
Denn alles Fleisch es ist wie Gras und alle Herrlichkeit des Menschen wie des Grases Blumen. Das Gras ist verdorret und die Blume abgefallen
—“Then all [the glory of the] flesh is like grass and all godlikeness [the illusion of being as God, or
hubris
if you like] of men, like the grass’s flower. The grass withers and the bloom falls” (I Peter 1:24, quoted in Brahms,
Ein Deutsches Requiem
).

6
.
Story,
November-December 1944.

7
. Today we’d call it post-traumatic stress disorder. They did not mean “tired.”

8
. Lois J. Meltzer, “Anti-Semitism in the United States Army During World War II” (master’s thesis, Baltimore Hebrew College, 1977), p. 101. Quoted in Dinnerstein,
Anti-Semitism,
p. 141.

9
. Ibid., p. 42.

10
. Sociologist E. Digby Baltzell acknowledged that he and many of his fellow naval officers returned home from World War II “far less willing to tolerate the traditional, often dehumanizing, ethnic snobberies of our prewar years” (ibid., p. 151).

11
. As a counter-intelligence officer, my father was one of the first soldiers to walk into a certain, just liberated, concentration camp. He told me the name, but I no longer remember.

12
. Centuries of Christian teachings that the Jews killed our Savior and that Jews suffer because God is punishing them, as a race, for this sin have been rescinded only in the past twenty years or so by prominent Protestant theologians, who say we must stop “bearing false witness against our Jewish neighbors” (Krister Stendhal, Harvard Divinity School). Pope John XXIII in the Second Vatican Council specifically “exonerated” Jews for Christ’s death, which means it is now against the teachings of the Catholic Church and false dogma to hold that the Jews are responsible for killing Jesus.

13
. My father never mentioned this visit with Hemingway to me, but I read about it in his letters on file at the Library of Congress.

14
. “A Boy in France,”
Saturday Evening Post
, March 31, 1945, p. 21.

15
. My aunt has said she didn’t notice him dabbling in anything “strange” medically or religiously before the war, nor does any such “abracadabra” appear in his pre-war writings, but I can’t be sure.

16
. Another soldier wrote a letter home voicing a similar despair as he wrote of a buddy’s death: “He wasn’t twenty years old. . . . Shrieking and moaning, he gave up his life on a stretcher. . . . Back in America the race tracks were booming, the night clubs were making record profits, Miami Beach was so crowded you couldn’t get a room anywhere. Few people seemed to care . . . we wondered if the people would ever know what it cost the soldiers in terror, bloodshed, and hideous, agonizing deaths to win the war” (Private Daniel Webster of the 101
^st
, quoted in Ambrose,
Citizen Soldiers,
p. 417).

17
. Elizabeth Frank,
Louise Bogan: A Portrait
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985), p. 338.

18
. The Twelfth Infantry Regiment was awarded the Distinguished Unit Citation for its defense of Luxembourg.

19
. Collection of letters of Whit Burnett, Library of Congress.