War Stories

Today I rode through the fields and back roads of the heartland to have lunch with a bunch of very old pilots and veterans and one man from Belgium whose life has united so many people who suffered through the horrors of world war II.

Talk about a healing journey. Imagine being a small boy crawling through tunnels in Belgium with your family to escape the horrors of war, of seeing your whole world blown apart from strange explosions that seemed to come out of nowhere, or riding in a box car from Romania to Austria with the hope that you and your sisters will not starve or worse. Imagine being another small boy, or girl in another country where they come into your elementary school and point out, "You. You. You and you come with us." They take you to trees, hand you a gun and have you climb up and your job is to shoot down enemy planes. You are only 12, 13, maybe 15 years old. You are so small your uniform covers your hands, your hat is too big, your pants are held up only by a belt cinched tightly around their folds. If you are scared, or refuse, you are treated as a traitor and will be hunted down. Worse, they may hunt down your brother and replace you with him. Sometimes a relative with a misplaced sense of loyalty turns in your name and you and your brother are taken away to support your country by working in armament factories, homesick and terrified.

The perception of these children is that each of the others country is a monster, because that is what they have been told and they dare not believe it isn't true.

Now imagine these children growing up to become the people I met today. People who search for planes from all these countries, who mark the places these planes went down, take pictures and gather up anything they can find using their eyes, metal detectors, whatever they have. Then they go home and begin to search archives for serial numbers on planes, on battery casings, on rings and id bracelets. They look up pictures, research family trees, going back to first one place and then another as families are contacted and ask questions. And sometimes they bring a man news that the brother he loved, who disappeared into nowhere during that war died in this place and even are able to bring that man his brother's id bracelet. Or they give a still grieving widow a story from a farmer who found her young husband and cared for him during his last moments on earth. They find the family of a little fifteen year old boy who dared to crawl out of the tree where he was supposed to shoot down planes and make his way across country where a farmer "adopts" him as his own and hides him until the war is over and then helps him escape into another life.

And in the end, all these "enemies" find they have more in common than they might have ever believed. These are the war stories I heard today as I held pieces of those planes in my hands and gazed at the pictures of soldiers who were not fighting a war far away across an ocean, but right there in their own home towns. I watched old men holding parts of planes that had carried them through the air and landed in fiery nightmares in foreign lands where good people took them in and helped them while risking their own lives and the lives of their families. I listened to a man who has spent his life helping people find loved ones no matter which side they fought on.

These are the real war stories, the ones where the people waited and grieved and loved just like you or I would our own children and husbands and fathers. The ones who had not only to endure the endless years of war and its privations, but had to go forward afterwords not knowing. These are the stories that point out how much alike we are no matter what we think.

It was an emotional afternoon. No what I might think about wars, I couldn't help but be stirred by these stories coming from these men.