Posted on 12/22/2002 8:54:51 AM PST by Dubya
Editor's note: Correspondence to Bill Mauldin can be sent to 10061 Riverside Drive, Box 1014, Toluca Lake, CA 91602.
It began with a call to arms from one soldier to others: help one of their own fight Alzheimer's by writing of memories from another great battle.
The letters came by the thousands.
Some were personal notes, sharing stories of survival and redemption with a man they never met. Others offered thanks to a man who brought laughter in dark times.
The letters were to cartoonist Bill Mauldin, who became the voice of the World War II infantry soldier with his characters Willie and Joe.
From 1940 to 1945, Mauldin drew the two disheveled riflemen who lampooned the military for Stars and Stripes and other military journals. Mauldin also fought alongside soldiers, earning their respect as one of their own.
Today, Mauldin, 80, no longer remembers his family, his career, even his two Pulitzer prizes. But he remembers the war, and those who fought in it are helping him keep those memories alive with their letters.
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In the introduction to Up Front, a wartime compilation of his cartoons in 1945, Mauldin described the infantry soldier for whom he drew:
"If he is looking weary and resigned to the fact that he is probably going to die before it is over, and if he has a deep, almost hopeless desire to go home and forget it all; if he looks with dull, uncomprehending eyes at the fresh-faced kid who is talking about all the joys of battle and killing Germans, then he comes from the same infantry as Joe and Willie."
Mauldin enlisted in the Army in 1940 and started drawing cartoons when he was assigned as a rifleman to the 180th Infantry.
With Willie and Joe, Mauldin turned the foot soldier's miseries and the horrors of war into humor.
In 1945, at 23, Mauldin won his first Pulitzer -- for Willie and Joe.
He won the second in 1959 for an editorial cartoon in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. His best-known postwar cartoon came on Nov. 22, 1963 -- the day President Kennedy was assassinated: in it, a grieving Abraham Lincoln covered his face with his hands at the Lincoln Memorial.
But for old soldiers, it was Mauldin's Willie and Joe that reverberated through the years.
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It started with 77-year-old Jay Gruenfeld, who spent years wondering what happened to the man who had made him laugh in a foxhole under fire.
More than five decades after the war, Gruenfeld mentioned Mauldin's cartoons in his self-published memories, and tried twice to send his book to Mauldin. Twice it was re-turned. Finally, he located the cartoonist's son, Dave Mauldin.
"When he called," the younger Mauldin said, "I had to tell him Dad was not doing well."
His father was suffering from Alzheimer's, he said, living in a care home in Orange County, Calif.
"I heard that and said, 'Well, I have to go see him,' " said Gruenfeld.
He spent hours with Mauldin, telling stories about the war and the life after.
"He smiled this big, beautiful smile," he said. "He needed to know he wasn't forgotten."
Gruenfeld returned home from that trip last spring with an idea: Get other veterans to write letters and visit.
He wrote to veterans organizations and contacted newspaper columnists. The word spread. Soon Mauldin was receiving hundreds of letters a day.
"Just give me the aspirin. I already got a Purple Heart."
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