PERSPECTIVES ON D-DAY : Coming to Grips With a Battlefield Vow : Alter the childhood fiction that war is a game, and avoid all conflicts not vital to life and liberty.

Fifty years have passed since Allied forces invaded France during World War II, but the memories of my experiences as a 19-year-old infantryman remain. As a psychoanalyst, my reminiscences have been filtered through a magnified perspective of self-observation. I still have visions of the aftermath of battles: mutilated GI bodies near our lines and, as we advanced, hundreds of bloated bodies of German soldiers, along with multitudes of civilians lying on the steps next to their homes and in their doorways and yards. I relive battles in fantasies and dreams. Amid these thoughts comes the face of my friend, Ronnie Helps, who never came home.

As a child, I could hardly wait till Saturdays, to see the Hollywood movies of the Great War. I wore the pilot’s helmet with goggles my parents had bought to keep me warm against the winter snows of Detroit, and pretended to be the American ace who shot down German planes. These boyhood fantasies and the illusion of personal immortality for the most part protected me on the battlefield from an overwhelming dread of death.

On the battlefield, there were times when I imagined we were engaged in a gigantic football game, with victory inevitable for the deserving side. During the Battle of the Bulge, as the Germans began to surround us, our platoon leader, Lt. Felice R. Ippolito, chose four men to move to a dangerous rear perimeter to cover our retreat if it became necessary. He ignored me, considering others braver and more reliable. I felt hurt, as if I had not made the first team, but some part of me recognized how senseless such a feeling was. This was not a football game. The men selected stood a high chance of being killed.

There were even moments during the fighting when I imagined that what I was watching was a scene from a Saturday afternoon movie, and how exciting it would have been to my childhood friends and me. Even a sense of surrealism arose the morning we advanced on the enemy through the rubble of a burning German village that U.S. and British artillery had just leveled. I spotted the torn pages of a book in German at my feet, flapping in the breeze on the floor of the remnants of what had been the bedroom of a house and now was an empty shell without walls. The title caught my eye: “All Quiet on the Western Front,” an anti-war novel written by a German soldier after World War I. War was still partially a game till the night the German shells trapped several of our companies crossing an open field, where we had no chance to dig foxholes. Men screamed helplessly as the shells landed, one after another, around us. There was nothing to do except to try to dig into the frozen soil with our shovels. I plunged my body behind a slight mound of earth. The ground was too hard to break. Our artillery responded, and after an hour or longer, the German 88s stopped firing. Men everywhere around me lay moaning or silently dead. Miraculously, I was unharmed. Still trembling with fear, those of us who could walk arose and returned to our lines as the medics arrived to carry off the wounded and the dead.

Now my illusion of immortality had been ripped away. I choked with fear as my heart pounded in my chest. I wanted to run away or cry like a baby or fall on my knees and beg the Army to let me out because I knew I would die in the next attack, but I remained silent. The following morning, I learned that Ronnie Helps had been killed in the same shelling that I had survived. My ever-smiling, good-natured friend, during both school and Army training, was gone. Now emotionally cognizant that I too could be killed, I prayed to the Lord, whose existence I doubted. I vowed that if He allowed me to survive and return home, no travail in life would cause me to suffer. If someone burned my house to ashes, if fortune kicked me as I lay helpless on the ground, all would be met with a resilient laugh and a hearty silent “the devil take you--I’m still alive.” And above all, I would help inform people of the realities of the games I played as a boy, which made me so receptive to war.

I eventually came home, where I have lived for half a century while Ronnie has lain in his grave in the American cemetery in Maastricht, Holland. The ordinary vicissitudes of living arose, along with the competitive struggles required to attain a place in life for my family and myself. My ambitions and self-concerns grew even beyond what was necessary for a comfortable existence. The pledges to help others, to be of use to the world, to work to protect our youth from the myths of war, once sacred vows on the battlefield, shrank and devolved into largely personal gratification.

How easy it is to forget the lessons I thought I had learned: that Ronnie and several hundred-thousand American servicemen like him, along with multitudes of Allied fighters, gave up all their possessions and all their pleasures for those of us remaining to have the opportunity to enjoy life; that death is forever, and that it is too easy to forget those to whom we owe everything. I had forgotten my promise to strive as mightily as possible to alter the childhood fiction that war is just another exciting game, and to remove the delusion of personal invulnerability and denial of pain inflicted upon others in a society so prone to wars and violence.

I had hoped that this might eliminate one of the major unconscious motivations to war and might avoid some conflicts that are less than absolutely necessary for the preservation of life or the fundamental principles in which we believe. I believe Ronnie would have smiled at this.