A Messenger of His Father’s Lost Battalion

For a long time after his father’s death in 1985, Gregory Orfalea was a writer who couldn’t write.

“Words withered inside me,” he would later explain. “. . . I can honestly say I was not undergoing a writer’s block for those years; I simply had no will to write, and in fact found the whole notion of writing empty. Understanding, and the will to understand, deserted me.”

It was the way his father died that so anguished him. Aref Orfalea, 60, was shot dead by his 31-year-old daughter, Leslie, inside the Kinko’s Copies store he operated in Woodland Hills. Leslie, who for many years had suffered from mental illness, then killed herself. For the Orfalea family, it all seemed beyond reason, beyond understanding.

Four years later, Gregory Orfalea’s grief led him to Europe to represent his father at the 45th anniversary reunion of the 551st Parachute Infantry Battalion. It was there that he regained the will to understand.

“Every person I talked to had a little shaving or spark of my father,” he recalls. “There was this self-effacement, the inner strength matched with no bravado. What they did was truly heroic--but they downplayed it.”

*

“Messengers of the Lost Battalion,” by Gregory Orfalea, is now on my night stand. This weekend I started reading it, and after the first few compelling chapters, I can understand why a reviewer in the Philadelphia Inquirer called it “a rich and rewarding tale” and “a masterly tribute from a son to his father.”

The lost battalion, of course, was the 551st, an independent group attached to the 82nd Airborne Division. The duty of young Aref Orfalea was that of a messenger. The messengers of the book’s title are the men who survived the Battle of the Bulge and shared their stories with their comrade’s son, who in writing this book became a messenger in his own right.

Their message is one of the nature of fear and courage and duty. Aref Orfalea, like many who saw combat in World War II, had seldom discussed the war. He told his sons he never killed anybody in the war; Greg would later learn that was a lie. Aref preferred to sum up his wartime experience with two statements. One was rich in irony: “I ate my K-rations on a silver platter at the Hotel Negresco in Nice.” The other was this: “All my friends were killed around me.”

Those words resonated a few years after his father’s death when, browsing in a small bookstore, Orfalea came across a passing reference in a book called “Ridgeway’s Paratroopers” by Clay Blair: “Nowhere were casualties heavier than in Wood Joerg’s 551st Battalion.”

The more research he did, the more messengers he met, the more Gregory Orfalea realized that the 551st had been wronged by history. Perhaps part of the problem was that the GOYAs, as they called themselves (for “Get Off Your Ass”), had a reputation as a rowdy, brawling, “bastard” unit that, among other things, once hijacked a streetcar in San Francisco and possessed one of the highest rates of venereal disease in the Army.

Whatever the reason, the battalion’s sacrifice was largely forgotten by all but the men themselves until Orfalea started his work. In the National Archives facility at Suitland, Md., he found one thin folder for the 551st. By contrast, its heralded sister battalion, the 509th, has 12 cubic feet of files.

As the 50th anniversary of the Battle of the Bulge approached three years ago, Orfalea, well into his research, described his maddening encounters with the Pentagon bureaucracy in a commentary that appeared in the Washington Post:

”. . . A center desk officer repeatedly told me that ‘the 82nd Airborne did not play an important role at the Battle of the Bulge.’ ”

Another time, Orfalea wrote, “The desk officer blurted over the phone: ‘More awards were given the 82nd Airborne for Grenada than for all of World War II.’ ”

Standards of heroism, it would seem, may have lowered with the times. Orfalea learned that the 551st was recommended to Gen. Matthew Ridgeway for a Presidential Unit Citation, an award that the 509th had received twice, but the recommendation was lost along with most of the battalion records. In 1989 Ridgeway wrote that the 551st had sustained “a grave error and injustice to as gallant a combat battalion as any in WWII in Europe.”

As the battle commenced, 689 men constituted the 551st and casualties exceeded 84%. Severe frostbite probably saved Orfalea. Company A, about 200 strong at the start, ended the fight with one officer and five enlisted men.

“The battalion,” Orfalea explained in the Washington Post, “took its objective in subzero weather with no artillery or air cover in five days of hand-to-hand combat against elements of two German divisions dug in on a hilltop with several machine guns pointing into a deep draw. It was a suicide mission; the 551st’s commander pleaded to get the final attack called off the night before. But the next day, he bowed his head to duty--and death. Incredibly, stumbling over the bloody corpses of their fellows on the snow-crammed hillside, the battalion captured the town of Rochelinval, a final German toehold west of the Salm River. It was a delirious battle in which, said one historian, ‘both sides had been bled white . . . and nearly reached the limit of human endurance.’ The following day, Jan. 8, Hitler ordered his first retreat at the Bulge.”

*

The bureaucracy and politics of the Pentagon are such that the 551st still hasn’t received a Presidential Unit Citation. But Greg Orfalea has made sure that they won’t be forgotten.

A 1967 graduate of Crespi Carmelite High School, Orfalea for many years had a day job as a writer and editor for government agencies, and he now writes speeches for Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corp. He had written two books of poetry before turning his attention to the story his father didn’t discuss, as well as the book “Before the Flame: A Quest for the History of Arab Americans.” His heritage is Lebanese and Syrian.

His mother, Rose, still lives in Tarzana, and Gregory Orfalea says he visits every year with his wife and their three sons. On his most recent visit, he read from “Messengers of the Lost Battalion” at Crown Books in Encino before more than 70 relatives, friends and veterans of the 551st, a few of whom live in the Valley and Greater Los Angeles. One veteran whom Orfalea had assumed was dead drove more than 400 miles from Vallejo for the 45-minute event and became teary-eyed when they met.

“Meeting the men,” Orfalea says, “was kind of a way of talking to my father beyond the grave.”

And now Greg Orfalea is working on a novel. From the brief description, it sounds like a coming-of-age story set in the San Fernando Valley of the 1960s. There will probably be a scene in which the protagonist and his pals hurl rotten apricots and limes at lovers parked on Mulholland Drive, just like young Greg Orfalea once did.

Maybe the hero’s father will be a veteran who didn’t like to talk about the war.