[Retain Mike]

I wrote this essay to be my annual contribution to Memorial Day and Veteran’s Day as my way to remember the many extraordinary men who surrounded me growing up. As a young boy though, they seemed common men who behaved as if they had experienced an ordinary rite of passage.

My most often contact with these men started about age nine when my dad began taking me out golfing on the weekends. There was a man who used the first golf cart I ever saw, because as a brigade commander of the 41th infantry in New Guinea he was debilitated by sickness. I remember one fairly good golfer who had kind of a weird back swing. I found out he was crippled while serving with the Big Red One in Sicily. My Economics professor in college served with one of the first UDT teams clearing barricades and mines in the surf zone before Pacific landings. I often ended up as a dishwasher at Michelbook Country Club and noticed the chef always limped as he moved around the kitchen. He saw my puzzled look, and said he got the limp from a wound received when he was with the Rangers at Pointe De Hoc. Those are just a few of the stories I remember among so many others I could tell or have forgotten.

I remain amazed how certain infantry divisions could be chosen repeatedly for initial assaults where they incurred terrible casualties. The corps and army commanders had favorites and somehow division staffs responded to reconstitute and retrain the rifle platoons every few weeks without losing the quality of the assault forces. It seems other divisions were usually sent to less active sectors, entered combat later in time, or occupied a flank in an attack. Again these were the most ordinary of men, so I keep hearing Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man as I read the narratives for this essay.

[skeeter]

The Germans and British rotated their infantry off of the line. As far as I know, the US and Japan were the only countries who kept their guys in the combat zone until they won, or were killed or wounded.

[Jeff Chandler]

My father was a Combat Engineer in the European theater. His unit was repeatedly tasked with sneaking forward ahead of the front line into enemy territory as commandos. They had to take and hold the beachhead on both sides of a river and construct bridges in time for the advancing troops to use. They were considered suicide missions.

As they crossed the bridges, the infantrymen would disparage the engineers as having it easy while they did the "real" fighting.

Once the troops had crossed to the other side, the engineers had to deconstruct the bridges, sneak forward into enemy territory to the next river, and build the bridges again.

The troops did not know they were crossing the same bridges on different rivers. If things had gone bad and a rapid retreat were necessary, they were screwed.

[The_Media_never_lie]

Mike, you are a perceptive, detail guy. Good job with article!