IT HAD ALL HAPPENED SO FAST, A CAVALCADE OF HISTORY speeding away like a stupendous comet to become smaller and smaller in memory, yet as vivid as when it filled the sky. Three years, two months, one week, six days: that was Joe's stint in the army, a sum that trips off his lips with a ready smile. The ten months at war were like a convex mirror, enlarging and distorting in its violence but also because ten months constituted a much larger percentage of his life in his twenties than in his seventies.
Joe's final journey began with passage through the Dardanelles to Port Said, in Egypt, where he transferred to a ship of irony, the HMS Samaria, which had carried him over the Atlantic and U-boats to England, where he'd arrived on September 17,1943, exactly one year after being inducted. This time the destination was Naples, where doctors removed the last of his war souvenirs in exchange for two Purple Hearts and GI dog tags.
“Hey, what happened to your other ones?” asked the sergeant who issued them.
“You really want to know?”
For ten days Joe enjoyed Neapolitan cuisine and evidence that the war, though not over, had become almost casual in southern Italy. Daily a German plane flew hundreds of miles to drop propaganda leaflets over Naples. The message was for Americans to surrender now before the Wehrmacht reconquered Italy. Rather than shoot the plane down as they easily could have, the Allies welcomed its visits for their comic effect.
On March 31, 1945, Joe began a long-awaited westward voyage. The next day was at sea and Sunday, the most beautiful Easter of his life. It was celebrated by mass on decks crammed with GIs. The priest asked if anyone had been an altar boy; Joe volunteered and is proud that he could recite every response in Latin.
Naturally during the boring days ahead dice rolled constantly for troops flush with back pay. With three hundred dollars in his pocket Joe started hot. By mid-Atlantic his winnings had reached thirty thousand, so vast a sum that he paid two bodyguards a thousand dollars each to protect it, not just from theft but from himself. “Throw me in the brig if I touch the last ten grand.” They almost had to. Joe lost the other twenty thousand.
From the Statler Hotel in Boston Joe called home, heard the voices of his parents and their emotion for nearly an hour. Their every other sentence was “You sure you're all right?” I soon will be, was his answer, because the next day he'd be on a train for Chicago.
There at Fort Sheridan occurred the last macabre event of Joe's war. As the homebound GIs were processed for leave and discharge, they were fed in a mess hall where German POWs were the KPs. Dinner one night was steak, baked potatoes, and all the trimmings. Several ex-krieges went back for seconds but were refused by the Germans. Melee and mayhem broke out when someone noticed SS tattoos. Before MPs arrived, a number of Germans were beaten to death with cafeteria trays or stabbed with steak knives. The incident never got into the papers. The war was not yet over, and censorship was still in effect.
Homecoming in Muskegon was in May 1945, the same month as V-E Day. Joe's train arrived at 11:30 A.M., to be met by a score of family, friends, and more kisses than he'd received in his previous twenty-one years. The welcomers pro-ceeded to his parents' house, where dozens of neighbors came by with congratulations, affection, and so many long hugs that Joe had to announce that his shoulders were still a medical problem. The phone never stopped ringing during the reception.
A huge dinner followed. He ate to the point of gorging but secreted some of the leftovers in his bedroom. Untouched during his absence, the room looked just as he'd left it at the end of his last stateside furlough, less than two years ago but a chasm in the past. Yet at that time in 1943 he had premonitionally known that his room would never be the same, and it wasn't. He'd left his youth there. Its symbols were now artifacts.
Concurrent with the hero worship bestowed upon him (which lasted for months), Joe started to point the course for the rest of his life. The postwar period had just begun while the personal consequences of the war, now overwhelmingly pleasant, lingered. Joe was not discharged till November 1945, a medical discharge with a percentage disability, from a hospital in Maywood, Illinois. The army made a pitch to retain him with a commission and assignment to Soviet coun-terintelligence. His posting would be in Berlin. Joe thought it over seriously but declined because “I didn't think I had any more luck left in Germany.”
During those months while hospitalized in Illinois he was invited to homes several times a week, feted on Chicago's Gold Coast, a guest at plays, operas, and even the World Series between Detroit and Chicago, the last time the Cubs were in it.
Postwar reality set in with his courtship of JoAnne Hol-lowell, who worked at Continental Motors. Hero was a status, not an occupation, and an occupation was the first building block he needed when he married in September 1946. Presiding at his wedding was the priest, Father Stratz, who had conducted Joe's funeral mass in September 1944.
Soon the Beyrles became parents in what would be called the baby boom. A major question was what to do with the GI Bill in which all veterans were eligible to participate. Notre Dame was still a possibility, though with a shattered knee Joe's track scholarship was off the table. Mortician's school seemed to promise a more direct payoff. Security was Joe's need now, never a necessity in his past.
Joe immersed himself in peacetime challenges for which his wartime attributes had little apparent application. His experience receded into a reflection of a Steinbeck title, Once There Was a War. Indeed there had been. It was in everyone's immediate memory but rarely evident as the U.S. economy boomed, absorbing the attention and pent-up constructive energy of the veterans.
Gradually and incidentally, further recognition seeped out of war records. It was not till 1953 that Michigan senator Arthur Vandenberg successfully petitioned the army to award Joe the Bronze Star for valor. On V-E Day, however, Joe had his own ceremony of closure.
Muskegon had erected a flagpole with a tablet at the base engraved with the names of some fifty local sons who had lost their lives in World War II. Joe's name was near the top alphabetically. He called up the local Veterans Council and announced his intention to go down to the memorial and remove his name. Regardless of what the city government might think—they'd probably only delay the ceremony bu-reaucratically—the veterans thought this was a great idea and attended in large numbers for the unpublicized, unauthorized ceremony.
Kriege George Rosie reflects on the Joe who emerged from that ceremony:
“He and I have been friends for many years. At times I wonder why because Joe sure has a mind of his own and no one's going to change it. I've gone head to head with him so I'm confident no one has ever backed him down.
“Last year on the phone he told me one of my best friends in the 101st was an SOB. I said if he said that again I'd hang up. He chuckled and said I had a right to my half-ass opinion. That's Joe—he gives and receives a lot of respect.”
The last word goes to Joe as he reflected on removing his name from the tablet of the war dead.
“I had the feeling—it was similar to the near-death experience after my heart bypass—that the occasion had something to say and to listen to. Quiet civilians were all around as I spoke. The long terrible war had just ended in Europe. That we all knew. What I knew which they didn't was how terrible it had been, and I'd seen only samples of the worst.
“Waiting at home the war had been slow for them, but for me it was like a combat jump. Those who were killed disappeared with so many others there was little time to think about them. They are probably greater in death than they were in life, but also many KIAs were better soldiers than many who became vets. It was God's call. What we were doing when I removed my name was remembering without understanding.
“Many people at that ceremony were living with the slow part of remembering. I didn't want that part, didn't feel it was something for me because I'd put it to the touch as the KIAs had. I was living. That's why we were there at the flagpole, to recover my name from those of the dead. I was living and ready to go.
“So I went out fast into the postwar world because I was young, had new responsibilities, and was able to push monsters down into caves. Never went into them till many years later when I felt I could and should.”
I thank Joe for taking me there with him, and for what he did.
“Okay,” Joe concedes, “I showed some courage in World War II. To tell you my story I needed to see if all these years later I could show it again. That's it.”
NOT QUITE. Earlier there had been an unforeseen reunion at the Hubb Recreation Center, where someone asked Joe if he remembered Ed Albers. No, though the name sounded familiar from somewhere. Well, you played against him in basketball, then he went into the Airborne like you. That's him over there shooting pool.
JOE'S STORY JOINS THOSE OF OTHER SCREAMFNG EAGLES, REcounted in films such as Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers. Presently the 101st is embattled in Afghanistan, as it was in Vietnam and the Gulf War. Readers inspired by this singular fighting force for freedom are invited to contribute to the erection of a monument at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. Tax-deductible donations may be sent to
101ST AIRBORNE DIVISION ASSOCIATION
FT. CAMPBELL MEMORIAL MONUMENT FUND
P.O. BOX 101
BENTONVILLE, OH 45105
PHONE: 937-549-4326
E-MAIL: assnl 01 abn@aol.com
There is a 101st website with this address: http://www.screamingeagle.org