Drums in a Graveyard

What strikes one about Larry Levin is the intensity of his feeling about a soldier he’s never met and about the guilt he struggles with over wars he’s never fought.

He doesn’t think of it as guilt exactly, because that’s too strong a word, but he is left uneasy by the patterns of fate that select one man to live and another to die.

Take Harold Cornfeldt, for example.

Larry and I were standing by his headstone in the Hollywood Cemetery one morning a week or so ago talking about men who march off to war.

There was a chill in the air and strands of mist lingered among the tall, pencil-thin palms that edge the graveyard.

“I keep thinking that could be me buried there,” Larry was saying, pointing to the gray headstone.

Carved on its face is a likeness of a B-17 bomber and the words, “In memory of our son and brother, Lt. Harold Cornfeldt, 1920-1945. He gave his life in freedom’s cause.”

“If I had been born a few years sooner or a few years later, I might have been the one killed in combat,” Larry said. “I missed everything.”

Missed everything?

The phrase was edged with remorse, like the kind you’d get from a guy who arrived too late to see the best play in a Super Bowl.

Larry noticed my surprise and added quickly, “I guess that’s stupid thing to say. I’m talking about the historical part of war. I missed that.”

He turned to the headstone again. “I just want to thank the lieutenant for being there,” he said.

Larry Levin, now retired, is 55. He was too young for World War II and Korea, and too old for anything that followed.

He’s thought about that a lot, and copes with the uneasiness by knowing a little about the battles we’ve fought in his lifetime.

He won’t call himself a war buff, but when he ran a used furniture store years ago he did collect military artifacts. There is atonement, at least, in awareness.

A slight, soft-spoken man, Larry began coming to Hollywood Cemetery when his father and uncle died in the 1950s.

Cornfeldt’s grave isn’t far from the site occupied by the two men, and when Larry passed it one day he noticed the B-17. Fascinated at first by the plane itself, he began to wonder about the man who once flew in it.

“I remember looking at the headstone one day and thinking the lieutenant was 25 when he died,” Larry said. “That’s pretty young. What was I doing when I was 25?

“Well, I was dating, going to the beach and having fun. When Harold was 25, he was flying over Germany, winning the war. If he hadn’t, I might be speaking German today.

“As a Jew, I have strong feelings about that. I grew up being told we’d all be killed if the Nazis got here. So I come to the cemetery. . . .”

But that wasn’t enough. Larry wanted to know who the man was, where he lived, where he went to school and how he died.

“It began to haunt me. I couldn’t bear the thought that his memory stopped here.”

He has since discovered that funeral arrangements for Harold Cornfeldt were made by his father and a sister, who lived in a quiet neighborhood on the Westside.

But they aren’t there now and the current occupants of the house know nothing about them.

Larry feels the sister might still be alive and he wants to say to her how much he appreciates what her brother did.

He wants the story ended, he said to me that gray morning at the cemetery. He wants the circle completed.

“Call it guilt if you want,” he said. “I call it appreciation.”

It doesn’t matter. Guilt, gratitude, obsession or an uneasiness with the random nature of chance. Emotion is important here, not semantics.

Larry feels a debt to a man he never knew for reasons too complex to understand. The least he can do is give him a past, if not a future.

I’ll help with that if I can. That’s why he asked me to meet him at the cemetery.

But if the life and death of Harold Cornfeldt remains locked in forgotten statistics, Larry has at least done him honor by recognition.

Beyond that, what emerges from his caring is how much our lives revolve around the wars we’ve fought, and how often we feel less than complete if we weren’t participants in the blood-letting.

That strange and awful feeling prevailed in other wars, and it will prevail after this one.

Larry Levin exemplified that when he said to me by the warrior’s headstone, “Here I am and there he is. Go figure it if you can.”

I can’t. And neither can anyone else.