Excerpted from former Atlanta Constitution Editor Eugene Patterson’s remembrance of a nearby fellow soldier killed in action during World War II as published in the book, “The Changing South of Gene Patterson.” Patterson died in 2013.
Soon after my Japan-bound troopship rerouted me to Norfolk, by grace of President Truman’s use of the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I got on a Greyhound bus to Unadilla and went to see Amory Speight’s family. His strong, accepting parents and his pretty young widow, Janie, and his two small sons, Roy and Jack, seemed to like me. I wanted to apologize. But they did not blame me. It was they who took pains to comfort me. Their forgiveness made my throat hurt.
Twenty years later the two brothers dropped by my office at the Atlanta Constitution. We’d stayed in touch. I’d just returned from a December 1964 reporting trip to the battle fronts of Vietnam. The fighting was low grade then. But the Speight brothers’ eyes sparkled as they told me they were joining the Air Force together.
Don’t do that, I told them. Your father has paid your family’s dues. He fought the big one to spare you this. Vietnam is as minor as it is dangerous. He would want you to go on with your educations and your lives. I do not think you ought to join the Air Force, I said.
“We already have,” they said. The flag was there. Their father went. They would.
Roy rose to the top management of the vast U.S. military commissary system in Western Europe during the Cold War. Jack became a top gun jet fighter pilot who volunteered for extended missions in the flak-thick skies over North Vietnam, and when he came home he qualified as a test pilot for the Air Force at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida. Upon retirement, they became achievers in the private sector.
Their father didn’t make it out of World War II.
The German officer who died young at Gera Bronn missed the half century that I have had. I went back to that village in 1989 and walked the street. No bullet nick remains visible in the edge of the aging building. The apple orchard where our column made the U-turn still stands. I remembered the young German and wished my aim had missed. The road stopped short near Crailsheim for him and the young American, Amory Speight. Luck left long avenues of life ahead for me. I have walked them with the memories of those two men present in my heart, and with two certainties about war lodged firmly in my mind.
First, there is my certainty that war is the ultimate obscenity. I came away from the terror convinced that it is the antithesis of civilization for human beings to organize the killing of one another when, unlike animals, they aren’t even hungry. Civilized ways simply must be found to settle man’s post-jungle conflicts.
Second, I am certain that pending the discovery of these civilized ways to deter violence, decency requires peaceful people to stand up and stop human predators from savaging the helpless when conscience is called to meet brute force with just strength. Shrinking from that duty has ill served peace, I think.
I see a sadness in this paradox, but not a contradiction; just a logical duty to act as conscience compels until intelligence can elevate the animalism that coarsened the history of my century.
In the meantime, my wife and I have decided we will be buried, when this shortening life is done, in Arlington National Cemetery. She is a native Virginian. And a lot of the soldiers who rest there are friends of mine.
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