My Life As A Warrior (Chapter One)

   As I may have said before, from the moment I emerged from my mother's womb hanging on to my twin sister's big toe for dear life, it became clear that I had not been born to be a warrior. I wasn’t even the passive aggressive type. In the cradle when my twin sister kicked me, I rarely kicked back. And when I did, I wasn't happy about it. I wasn't combative.

   In the fourth grade, at Coventry school when Reno Koepke, whose father was the manager of Mayfield Cemetery, viciously tackled me in a touch football game, I didn't fight back. I walked away and never played football in the schoolyard again. I didn't even blame anti Semitism.
   I just didn't do contact sports. I did try out for the track team, but was not anywhere fast enough.
   I occasionally got angry with my twin sister, and I remember chasing her around the dinner table with a sharp pencil and swinging out at her face. (I missed, Doctor Carson.) But I remember feeling very angry. Can't remember why, Doctor.
   So by the time I was ready to graduate from high school, I was perhaps the last person you might expect to volunteer to be inducted into US Army in the middle of World War II.
That was 1944. There was this ethos: War on. And for some inexplicable reason I signed on with the other guys, to be inducted the morning after graduation, it was the thing to do, to avoid being thought of as something less than a real man. I signed on. I was ready. I told every one who would listen. Particularly my girlfriend Rita Barnett, a nice Jewish SDT sorority girl. Her dad was manager of the shoe department at Sterling’s, a classy women's store downtown.

   At the time I really believed that I would be assigned to an officer training program on some college campus, since that is what happened to my good friends who went before me. Tom Schattenfield was at the University of Michigan, Larry Coben at the University of Kansas, and Bob Saslaw at Penn State. So I plowed forward.

   Reality struck when I got to Columbus after a tearful goodbye to my mother at Pennsylvania station at 55th and Carnegie. After a day of painful shots in the arms and all kinds of tests much like the SAT that I was sure I had aced, the minute the group of about 50 of us were assembled the captain called us to attention. I felt like top dog. Maybe an appointment to West Point, Dr. Carson.
But the mystique of any sort of academic future faded quickly as the captain barked:
   “We've had a new order from headquarters, the ASTP program has been cancelled."
I nearly wet my pants. He went on, “Private Weidenthal, you got the highest grade on the test. You are assigned to the 95th Infantry division at Indiantown Gap, Pennsylvania.”

   At that memorable moment in my life, I had become a warrior, first class. Like it or not.
And although I squirmed a bit, I accepted reality and decided to go with the flow. None of the cheap psychotic tricks that some of the guys talked about, like the peanut butter on the toilet seat trick, or simply feigning insanity. Not for me. This neurotic kids from Cleveland Heights was playing it straight, Doctor.
   It turned out that the 95th had been training for combat for two years at Camp swift in Texas, and was assembling in Pennsylvania for the trip to the war zone and had been assigned to join General George Patton’s famed army for the march across Europe. It was not all fun and games. I saw it as historically significant, but personally dangerous.
Basic training for this kid from Cleveland was more than learning the “F word” as the adjective preceding every course of every meal.
   “Basic” had its memorable moments. Like the day someone shoved an M 1 rifle under my arm and ordered me to crawl in my belly through 50 yards of Pennsylvania mud while a fifty caliber machine gun mounted on a Jeep fired real bullets over our heads.
I remember being petrified, Doctor.
   We heard later that one terrified young man stood up and his body was torn apart by the the deadly bullets. They say the shooting ceased for awhile so they could remove his remaining body parts. I didn’t see it, but they say it happened, Dr. Carson.
   Or the day on mountain maneuvers in the Snake River Canyon of West Virginia, where I was assigned to carry tree pigeons in a cage on my back. They were geniuses. So smart, you could tie a note to their feet telling them where to go, and by God, they would make it. Of course my back was covered with more bird droppings in one day than the Ciivil War monument on Public Square gets in an entire summer. So much for basic training.
   Sometime during this period, my magnificent, caring mother, taking view of reality as only a mother can, came to Pennsylvania. She was on her way to New York on business and took me to dinner with some people she knew, including dear friend Leo Shore and his wife Shirley.

   Leo was a tough 32 year old Jewish business man who happened to be assigned to my unit. It was toward the end of the evening that she looked Leo in the eye, wagged her finger him and declared,
“You take care of my boy!”
Her words turned out to be more meaningful than we at that table in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania in 1944, could ever imagine.

To be continued…

Next week:
B-bombs and blackouts
Missing the boat to Omaha Beach
“I Always Wanted to Kill A Jew”
Having lunch with Gen. Patton
Winning the air medal
The Battle of the Bulge
Losing best friends
My life as a muckraker