Warum?

In 1969 a WW2 veteran comes to grips with his demons and a wife's infidelity.

*

The pain seemed to emanate from everywhere as I lay in the bed listening to the incessant beeping of a machine somewhere to the right of my head. With a jolt I grasped I was in a hospital and must be seriously injured judging by the amount of pain I was enduring.

I was disorientated and tried to remember what had occurred, but it was just not coming to me. I decided to start with some simple things. What year was it...1969. Who was the president...Nixon. What was my name....John Stapleton. How old was I.....49.

Ok, I have some basic parameters in place which meant my mind was still working. Now let's try some recall, what memories could I pull up? As I lay there I saw mental flashes of my brother Jack and me during the depression gathering coal that had fallen from the trains so that we could have heat during the winter. I remember my paper route and the fact that my family was so poor during the depression that all the money my brother and I made we turned over to our mother just so we could put food on the table.

My mind continued to flash pictures and I recalled that we were having dinner when we found out Pearl Harbor had been bombed. I also recalled enlisting in the army on January 2nd 1942, I was twenty two.

Memories started cascading from my mind at that point, basic training in Louisiana, shipping over to England, more training and then June 6th 1944. I was a sergeant by then in charge of a squad. The beach was my first real taste of combat and I wished with all my might that it would've been my last. Most of us made it through that day but in the following months I lost all of my original squad except Jack Murphy, a farmer with a wife and two kids from Pennsylvania.

Jack was my best friend and more like a brother to me than even my own flesh and blood. We fought through the hedgerows in Normandy, at the St. Lo breakout and all across France. With each guy we lost Jack and I drew closer together.

We thought that we might just get through the war safe and sound but then came the Huertigan Forest. During the winter of 44 we came up against a well-entrenched and still dangerous enemy. The woods were treacherous and the body count began to rise as we pushed our way through. We had felt before the Huertigan that the war was nearly won but the Germans soon debased us of that notion.

Our battle was eclipsed by events in the Bulge where Hitler had managed a powerful counterattack, but the Huertigan was every bit as desperate and deadly. In the ninety days that the battle lasted the US Army had about 24,000 combat casualties with another 9,000 men suffering trench foot or exhaustion so that had to be pulled from the line.

My war changed just before Christmas of 1944. My squad was sent to reconnoiter an area in front of our lines to determine enemy positions and firepower. It was felt at G-2 that the Germans might have been pulling back and they needed to know.

My seven men including me set out to scout the line in the early hours of December 20th. We had gone nearly a quarter of a mile and were spread out when the early morning was shattered by a loud PHHHHHTTTTTTT as an MG-42 spit out 1200 rounds per minute. My men hit the ground but I noticed that Murphy had fairly been cut in two by the Kraut machine gun. I called out as loudly as I could, "Keep down and give me suppressing fire!" With the rest of the squad pumping lead in the direction of the gun I moved out to the right hoping to outflank it.

The problem with outflanking is that you never know how many men the enemy has on their flanks or where they might have another heavy weapons emplacement for covering fire. This morning I got lucky. I soon found they had only one flanker and he was an old man, a leftover from the First World War judging by the medals he was wearing. He never knew what hit him as I squeezed off a round from my Garand and dropped him.

I moved up on the gun which was still spraying lead at my men and lobbed a grenade into the pit. The sound was loud in the crisp winter air and I moved up to insure that the crew was dead. As I watched one soldier stirred and moved with a look of fear creeping over his face when I jumped into the pit.

I was not in my right mind as I now only wanted a little pay back for my best friends life. The kraut was wounded but not too badly and called out gently, "Hilfe!" He must have seen something horrible in my face as he began to squirm in an effort to escape from me. I just looked at him and thought, "This bastard killed my friend." His eyes grew wide with fear as I pointed my Garand at his face and in a pleading voice he kept saying, "Nein! Nein!" Finally he must have realized the futility of what he was saying as his face took on a calmer look even though the fear was still evident and in a quiet calm voice simply said, "Warum?" It was the last thing he ever said as I pulled the trigger sending a 30.06 round through his skull.

When I shot I seemed to come to my senses again as I realized the kid I shot had couldn't have been no more than sixteen. I rifled through his pockets and found his soldbuch, which contained all his personal information. Much to my dismay the kid had been in the army only ten days. In late 44 the Germans were hoping that all the training the Hitler Youth gave them would suffice to stop the enemy.

When one of my men, Kaminsky came up to the gun trench I remembered he spoke some German. Without looking at him I asked, "Ski, what does " warum" mean in German?" His answer would haunt me for the rest of my life when he flatly replied, "It means why."

The war ended for me a month later when I got shrapnel in my leg which took me out of combat. I left the battlefield but the battlefield never left me.

I came home in 45 with some souvenirs of the war and a permanent limp.

My family had arranged a welcome home party for me and that's where I met Becky my future wife. Becky had worked with my brother at Curtis Wright aircraft during the war and they had become friends. They had dated, but they seemed to lack the spark that transforms friends into lovers. It was definitely not that way for us as I hit it off with her immediately.

Becky was what I needed, young, beautiful and full of life. When I looked into her sparkling green eyes I felt that all my sins had been forgiven. I wanted her to be with me till I died and I asked her to marry me one month to the day after I met her. To my great joy and surprise she agreed.

Time moved quickly and I was discharged from the army, newly married and moving up in the world. I got a job expediting orders at Bethlehem Steel and became a productive member of society. The only problem I had was the dreams I could not shake, that kid in the forest and the word warum plagued me. I felt guilty over the fact that I had murdered a boy but I never spoke of it and kept it bottled up inside of me.

In 1947 we had our first and only child, a boy we named Jack after my friend, Jack Murphy who died in the Huertigan forest. Over the years the one thing that my both wife and son learned was to not ask me about the war. I wouldn't talk about it because I couldn't. I never let them know what hell was like and hoped they would never find out themselves.

Jack grew up to be a strapping young man who wanted to get into the military in the worst way. I told him not to join the army as Viet Nam was going strong by 1966. However, Just like me he didn't listen and became a chopper pilot. He died in combat during the Tet offensive in 1968.

With our son's death my marriage seemed to decay. Becky withdrew from me and I could not get her to let me back into her life. Somehow I think she blamed me for Jack's death as I had never tried to stop our son from enlisting. Her contention was that by me not telling our boy about the war I had inspired him to enlist to find out for himself. She would continually snap at me and civil words between us became a rare thing indeed.

I knew that she was grieving for her lost son but so was I. Blaming me for his death was lubricious but there was no stopping it. We both needed each other but instead we were both intent in driving the other away.

Nearly a year went by and still we were antagonistic to each other. The only normalcy in my world by then was my job and then it went away. In the summer of 1969 my department was eliminated by Beth Steel. I was given a severance pay for my twenty four years of loyal service and simply let go.

That day I came home early for the first time since we had been married. When I walked into the house I expected Becky to be shocked but instead it was me who was shocked as I heard the sound of passion emanating from our bedroom. As I walked down the hall I felt a white hot anger building in me that I had not felt since Murphy's death in 44.

When I looked in the bedroom my eyes were assaulted by the vision of my naked wife in bed with the next door neighbor's son who was home from college. She was moaning loudly as he orally serviced her and she was calling out God's name but somehow I didn't think she was praying.

Without thinking I turned from the deceitful scene I was witnessing and went to the garage. Finding the trunk I had bought after the war to store my army mementoes in, I brought it down from its perch and put it on the floor. Even though I had not looked in the trunk since 46 I still kept the key on my key ring and with quivering hands unlocked it. Pulling up my old uniform I found it wrapped in a Nazi flag, a P-38 pistol. Along with the gun I found its clip and even the original eight rounds that had been in the weapon when I took it from a German officer I hot shot. Loading the rounds in the clip I slipped it into the grip and pulled the slide back.

Walking back through the house the sounds had gotten louder if anything and by the time I was stepping inside of my bedroom I was greeted by the sight of my wife and her lover in a missionary position with her arms wrapped around him urging him to do her harder and deeper. They were both oblivious to me until I hit the lever that allowed the slide on the P-38 to slam home with a resounding click.

The noise from the gun echoed loudly in the bedroom and they both stopped and looked over at me. The boy fell out of my wife as he rolled over onto his back with a frightened look on his face. Becky was also shocked but I think it was at the expression on my face as I moved quickly around the bed and brought the pistol up to the boy's face.

Becky was screaming, "Stop!" but it was too late. I felt my finger tightening on the trigger and with a rage inside of me I was going to end this whole charade. It was then that I looked into his eyes and they were the same as that German kid I shot in 44. In that minute I knew I would not kill again and with a slow final gesture I brought the gun down and away from his face. The room was absolutely silent as I said in a sad voice looking over to my wife, "Warum?"

Not expecting any answer I turned and let the gun drop to the floor as I left the house. As I was leaving the boy broke into tears and Becky was calling my name but I just didn't care anymore. I walked out and got into my car and without a backward glance left my life behind.

Somehow in my daze I returned to the one place where years ago I felt hope for my future. It was a bar in the northern section of town with the grand name of the Excelsior. When I had gotten off the train returning home in 45 a group of us discharged soldiers stopped in to have a beer. I remember how life seemed to be limitless for us because the war was over. We all had hopes and dreams then, now mine were pretty much shattered. In 1969 the train station was long gone, but the bar still remained.

The neighborhood had become disreputable and downtrodden but almost on autopilot I went into the bar. The décor and clientele had changed greatly since the forties but the solid wooden bar was still the same. Feeling like I had found an old friend, I sat and ordered a beer.

The beer became two and then three as I sat and tried to figure out where my life had gone. I had lost everything, my friend, my son, my job and now my wife. By the time the bar was closing I was feeling no pain but I was not in a good mental place.

As I staggered from the bar I noticed a movement in the shadows as someone approached me. As I looked up it was a young man holding a gun on me. His voice was nervous and clipped when he said, "Give me your money old man! NOW!" I looked from the gun to his face and replied, "No."

Somewhere in my drunken mind I had determined that I had had enough. First it was the army telling me what to do, then my employer, then my wife and now this punk. No, now it was time to make my own destiny and since I no longer really cared what that was it was easy for me to refuse him. The fact is you are only scared if you have something to lose and since I had already lost it all, I had no fear.

The punk was confused but obstinate, "Give me your money now old man or die!"

I only smiled at him which seemed to disconcert him even more, "Go ahead kid, pull the trigger."

The panic was evident in his voice as he ordered me again, "You think I'm messing with you asshole! Give me the money!"

I shook my head no and replied in a flat monotone, "Fuck you."

The explosion was loud and bright and the pain inside of my body felt like my organs had spontaneously combusted into flame. Mercifully, the pain was brief as it was quickly replaced by darkness as I felt myself sagging down onto the street with the life draining from my body.

And that brought me back to the hospital room and its beeping monitor and searing pain. Apparently I had not died and in fact from the amount of pain I was enduring I was very much alive. I wanted to open my eyes but seemed unable to accomplish the task.

I was feeling myself starting to slip into that dark pit again when I felt a soft caress to my face and a voice that was familiar to me whispering in my ear, "Please came back to me John! I'm so sorry! I was messed up in my mind darling! I was lonely and flattered by his attention and let myself be coerced but I never meant it to turn out this way. I love you my husband and always will. We have lost so much John don't let us lose each other. Come back to me my love and give me a second chance. I know now just how much you mean to me." At this point I felt warm water on my cheek and the sounds of Becky's sobbing echoing in my mind.

I tried hard to pull myself up from that dark pit wanting to take me down and with a great effort managed to open my eyes to find Becky's face very close to mine. At first she seemed unable to comprehend that I was looking at her but then she jumped up and started screaming for the doctor.

Within a few hours and close observation by the nurses I seemed to stabilize and the chances of relapsing back into a coma were remote. Finally, when all the action died down, we were alone and Becky came over and hugged my face to hers apologizing again for her actions and blaming me for our son's death.

I was still mad at her but I also still loved her and didn't want to lose her. We really talked for the first time since our son's death and discovered things about each other we didn't know. I finally opened op about the war and the things that I did and the demons that still plagued me. Becky told me about her grief and how lost she felt and finally how she needed someone to blame for his death and wrongly lashed out at me.

She also told me about the boy she had made love to, how he had been at home for the summer and came onto her when her self-esteem was at its lowest. He had seduced her and knowingly she had allowed herself to be taken. She really seemed conflicted by what had happened and it scared her.

I was still mad at her for allowing herself to fall under his spell but I had already begun the process of forgiving her. We shared a long marriage and the death of a son, we needed each other for support and had both forgotten that. By the time she had to go home we both realized that we still belonged together and that was where we had to start rebuilding from.

When I got home from the hospital she had redone our bedroom so that it was nothing like when I had found them together. We healed and moved on and life did get better. I managed to get a job again working for an insurance agency in the spring of 1970 and we developed a new appreciation for each other. Forgiving and forgetting came hard but we both achieved it and our love held us together.

Nobody knows how much time we have on this earth and nobody should spend that time in the useless pursuit of anger and revenge. My wife and I moved on and had a pretty good life together after that. Did we fight? Definitely. Did we have relapses? Yes, sometimes when you least expected it the memories all came back and the anger with it. However, just like a fire it had to be put out and forgotten.