ABSTRACT
The black and white photograph had been blown up from a snapshot taken in early March of 1945, seven men in a forest. They are posed the way a school class is posed in a group portrait, two sitting and one kneeling in the front row, three standing behind them, and my father standing alone in a third rank. That was his squad, he explained, he was its sergeant. His arms are around two of them, one of whom looks very tall. That was one of the two Texans, he explained, whose somewhat innocent bellicosity probably tipped his decision to take a pill box after being abandoned by the man he would eventually call, more than fifty years later, “Lieutenant N-.” Years later, encountering the phrase “Lieutenant N-” in print made a few typed pages feel more like a Maupassant story than something written by a former GI, but I saw the photograph first, and when he talked about it he sounded like an American. The very small man sitting in the front row, an enormous BAR across his lap, was apparently typical—perversely enough, my father explained, the smallest man usually had to carry the BAR. The other Texan, also standing, has a grease gun in a sling across his chest, and 48two men in the front row are holding M1s. They must have all been young, although they do not look it. Their winter uniforms appear dirty, rumpled and ill-assorted. I was disappointed that they seemed so drab, not quite taking in that they are wearing their working clothes. Four of the men, my father one of them, are smiling, although the man with the BAR is not. I ask my father, excited to see the people I take these men to be, “are these the men you fought with in the Bulge?” He is clearly a bit surprised by this question. No, he explains, they were all replacements.
