Dream Catcher: A Memoir by Margaret A. Salinger Read Free Book Online Page A

sides of the line had an image of a manger in Bethlehem in their minds.
    Or this, the opening of the chapter entitled “Victory, Apri1 1–May 7, 1945”:
    Easter came on April 1 in 1945. In many cases the celebration of the Resurrection brought the GIs and German civilians together. . . . The GIs were surprised to find how much they liked the Germans. Clean, hardworking, disciplined, cute kids, educated, middle-class in their tastes and life-styles—the Germans seemed to many American soldiers to be “just like us.” . . . They were regular churchgoers.
    Rabbi Roland Gittelsohn, an Army chaplain at the time, writes in his memoirs an account of the day before Easter, in 1945, when he went to ask his superiors to reconsider an order that all soldiers on base be required to attend Easter services. He was met with hostile incredulity and told that the Jewish soldiers had a choice of Protestant services or Catholic. “We all stand in formation to salute a General and show respect, what’s wrong with being required to show respect for our Savior?”
    “What’s wrong?” Where to begin? Perhaps with a version of the Bible issued to service men and women in 1943 that included such section titles as “The Jews Are a Synagogue of Satan” and “Israel’s Fall: The Gentile’s Salvation.” It wasn’t until the 1980s that prominent Catholic and Protestant theologians began to address systematically the problem of how to have a Christian identity that isn’t profoundly anti-Jewish. 12
    Let’s just say that attending Easter services in 1945 might not have been a big morale booster for Jewish service men and women.
    Citizen Soldiers ends with a John Doe sketch of the typical everyman GI:
    There is no typical GI among the millions who served in Northwest Europe, but Bruce Egger [meet John Doe] surely was representative. . . . He served out the war in almost continuous front-line action. He never missed a day of duty. He had his close calls, most notably a piece of shrapnel stopped by the New Testament in the breast pocket of his field jacket, but was never wounded. In this he was unusually lucky. G Company had arrived on Utah Beach on September 8, 1944, with a full complement of 187 enlisted men and six officers. By May 8, 1945, a total of 625 men had served in its ranks. Fifty-one men of G Company were killed in action, 183 were wounded, 166 got trench foot, and 51 frostbite. Egger rose from private to staff sergeant.
    My father, too, rose from private to staff sergeant, landed on Utah Beach—on D-Day, June 6, 1944, however, not in September—never missed a day of service, was on or near the front lines with the Twelfth Infantry Regiment of the Fourth Division from D-Day to VE day, from Utah Beach to Cherbourg, on through the battles of the Hedgerows and bloody Mortain to Hürtgen Forest, Luxembourg and the Battle of the Bulge. He, too, was lucky. The Twelfth Infantry landed on D-Day with a company of 155 officers and 2,925 enlisted men. By June 30, less than a month later, in fighting from Utah Beach to Cherbourg, the total casualties for officers was 118, or 76 percent, and for enlisted men, 1,832, or 63 percent.
    “Last Day of the Last Furlough” was published on July 15, but its author couldn’t have known about it until, at the earliest, the seventeenth, when, outside of Deauville, he and the other men of the Twelfth Infantry had their first shower and change of clothes since leaving England on June 5. On the day the story was published, these soldiers were in the midst of some particularly nasty fighting in hedgerow country about six hundred yards east of Saintenay, France. The Twelfth Infantry had recently finished what was basically hand-to-hand combat, clearing out the city of Cherbourg, building by building, street by street, body by body. They were now painfully gaining territory, one miserable field at a time, each bounded by nearly impenetrable hedgerows (the United States had not figured on this