A profound armistice experience

When young Charlie Shay hit Normandy’s Omaha Beach as a combat medic with the Army’s 1st Infantry Division on D-Day, June 6, 1944, he had no way of knowing that he would one day be honored by France with its highest decoration for his heroic actions in that epic World War II battle.

But on Tuesday, there he was along with six other World War II veterans, receiving the prestigious French Legion of Honor medal from French President Nicolas Sarkozy in an emotional Washington, D.C., ceremony that Shay, 83, a member of the Penobscot Nation who lives on Indian Island, later described as “the pinnacle of my life.”

The ceremony, which came as a grateful nation prepared to render tributes to its veterans of all wars in Veterans Day ceremonies, served to remind us that the aging warriors of World War II – “The Big One” – are a steadily vanishing breed.

As the old soldiers fade quietly away, their obituaries in the newspaper are enhanced by a logo featuring the flag they served so unselfishly in answering America’s call in its time of need. Like Shay, many performed above and beyond duty’s demands.

In Shay’s case, it was on a godforsaken Normandy Beach as Allied forces stormed the enemy ramparts, at a terrible cost in young lives. For saving wounded comrades by pulling them from the water and treating their wounds under heavy enemy fire in the D-Day invasion that paved the way for victory in Europe, he was awarded the Silver Star and two Bronze Stars for valor.

By war’s end 11 months later, Shay had participated in the Battle of the Bulge, as well as in fighting at Mons, Aachen and the Hurtgen Forest. After crossing the Remagen Bridge in March 1945 he was captured by the Germans and spent six weeks as a prisoner of war. He later served with the Army during the Korean War, before joining the Air Force to complete his military career.

In an interview aired on Maine Public Broadcasting Network, Shay was low-key about his Omaha Beach exploits, saying he had simply done the job for which he had been trained. The rescue of his comrades, despite the hellish circumstances, had seemed the right thing to do, as natural as taking his next breath. Many an old combat veteran, if asked about his experience under fire, would likely offer a similar response.

But in recalling their long-ago ordeal, the old-timers – from Vietnam on back through the country’s other wars that were more conventionally fought than the frustrating guerilla action being waged in Iraq – may well consider the more endurable memories to be associated with collateral things not in their job descriptions.

Famed World War II correspondent Ernie Pyle explained it vividly when he wrote that war’s most memorable experience, perhaps its worst, is “the accumulated blur, and the hurting vagueness of too long in the lines, the everlasting alertness, the noise and fear, the cell-by-cell exhaustion, the thinning of the ranks around you as day follows nameless day….”

The “constant march into eternity of your own small chances for survival,” leaves its toll, Pyle wrote in a dispatch from the front. “There is nothing left behind but the remains – the lifeless debris, the sunshine and the flowers, and utter silence. An amateur who wanders in this vacuum at the rear of a battle has a terrible sense of loneliness…”

The “utter silence” that Pyle cites can be a glorious thing when it is a silence such as World War I veterans Phil Koritzky of Bangor and Everett McKenney of Waterville experienced in France when an armistice took effect in that great war on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918.

Both men have passed on. When I interviewed them some years ago – Koritzky at 89, McKenney a vibrant 102 years old – their common memory of the historic armistice from which the present Veterans Day commemoration flows was the eerie, stupefying quiet that descended so suddenly along the front at the appointed hour.

“Everything got awfully quiet all at once,” said McKenney. “We knew that something had happened, but we didn’t know just what it was. It’s one day I’ll always remember. Oh, yes.”

And who wouldn’t? As the drum bangs slowly in mournful cadence at this year’s Veterans Day parades, the common prayer is that America’s servicemen and women in harm’s way in Iraq and Afghanistan may soon come to know – and always remember – the day when the weapons of war went utterly silent.

BDN columnist Kent Ward lives in Limestone. Readers may contact him via e-mail at olddawg@bangordailynews.net.