My Life with PTSD As Told to Dr. Freud (Part One)

“PTSD? Vat in the Vorld is that?,” the old man murmured as I started telling my story.

I understand, Dr. Freud, they hadn't dreamed up the disease in those days, sir, but let me explain.

In the spring of 1944 the 95th Division was wrapping up the war in Europe. We had taken Metz in a brutal battle that had cost us 50% casualties. Our first sergeant, a fine man from Indiana, was dead from a fatal wound to the stomach. Several of my close friends had been killed in an ambush. Our regimental commander was sent back to Paris for psychiatric treatment. Then there was a brush with The Bulge, another trauma.

I was still a callow 19 year old, shaken but not battered by these events. We ended up the war by crossing the Rhine and taking Dortmund, a Cleveland-like steel town on the Ruhr, destroyed by the battering of the final surge of the war.

We were the labeled “Victory Divison.”

On VE day we celebrated with the rest of them.

We took off our steel helmets and simultaneously breathed in the fresh spring air. No guns, no carbines, no M ones. The weight was off our shoulders.

It was like being reborn, Doctor. You understand the feeling. I was alive, I had survived the war!

“Ya, ya,” he murmured, showing absolutely no emotion.

I was ready to become a human being again. I was a young buck ready to come home a hero to my beloved girlfriend, who wrote me almost every day. To my grandmother, Goldie, my twin sister and some adoring friends. I was joyous.

But there was a hitch. There always is, Doctor.

Right?

Word somehow slipped out, perhaps through WikiLeaks, that our unit would soon be moved to the port of Hamburg and shipped back to the states to prepare for the invasion of Japan!

OMG, I screamed to myself...What will I tell my mother?!

Compared to Japan, Europe was a piece of cake, Doctor Freud. I was really anxious.

I tried to pretend this was all a bad dream, Doctor.

Why me? Why the 95th? What did we do to deserve this?!

We tried to kiss it off as just a wild army-type rumor, as we climbed aboard the troop ship in late May for the trip back to Boston and wherever destiny would take us. We were the first combat division to go back.

Dr. Freud, Dr. Freud are you asleep?

You dropped your pencil! I was going to Japan, Doctor. Did you hear me?

lnvade. Japan. A terrible place! I can't even speak the language.

The old man scowled, a bored scowl.

He mumbled, “You're time is up, son. I will write you a prescription for Valium. Take two before you go bed. You'II feel better.”

But Doctor! Japan!  Banzai! Kamikaze!

Unmoved, he murmured, "Stay calm, call my secretary in two weeks. Maybe I can help.”

(To be continued)

My Life As a Hero

This headline says...My Life as a Hero!

Wait a minute. Hold on, guys.

Who wrote that headline?

I'm no hero. Never have been. Never really wanted to be.

How did that word get up there?

Well, it turns out that there is a germ of truth here. I have been reading about this utterly remarkable woman who was born in Africa. I was wandering through her aerial exploits in her single engine monoplane over unsettled unfriendly countryside, taking off and landing on rough, uncharted landing strips, and my mind led me back to another continent, to another time, indeed another century.

It was late Fall 1944, in Europe. There was this moment in the war when I might have had a brush with the heroic...didn't seem so at the time.

We were in this historic battle for that fortress city of Metz, right on

the French-German border, a bastion that had never been captured by

enemy warriors throughout history, and here we were: fighting the Germans who had holed up in the forts of the Maginot Line. (Built by the French, but captured by the Germans during the Blitzkreig.)

Two companies in our 95th division, were attempting an end-around

attack, devised by our bombastic regimental commander, Col. Bacon, a Patton protégé. (come to think of it, he now reminds me of Donald Trump)

By U.S. Signal Corps [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Well the maneuver didn't work, and two companies were trapped on the

other side of the Maginot fortress, running out of food and ammunition and in

desperate need of first aid materials for their wounded comrades.

In the midst of all this mayhem, Captain Compton, our company

commander a decent human being, a high school gym teach from South

Carolina, called me to his quarters.

“Weedenthal,” (he incessantly called me Weedenthal)

“Weedenthal, you ever flown in a plane?”

“No sir, never flown in a plane.”

“Well here's your chance. Show up tomorrow after breakfast. We need you to help in a rescue mission. We picked you and Corporal Spinelli to volunteer for the mission. You're small. You'll fit in the space behind the pilot."

So he had volunteered.  Maybe that explains the “hero” word.

"Hold the headline guys. Maybe we can still use it!”

The next morning, after very little sleep, I showed up and we got in a couple

of jeeps. They took Corporal Spinelli, a little cook from Chicago, and me to a

sprawling cow pasture. It was very uncharted; very uneven. In the distance four

Piper Cubs...looking old and fragile, not unlike the plane that our African

queen had been flying a few chapters back. They we actually artillery

spotter planes connected to the battalion of cannons supporting us. In the

Army they were called L-4's

Well Spinelli, and I and two little guys from another unit, looking as

confused as we were, stumbled across the pasture and we each climbed

aboard our plane.

"Private Weidenthal, climb board aboard." said the pilot. (I was pleased

that he, at least, had pronounced the name properly.)

“There is a box back there you can sit on. We'll put the boxes of supplies and your lap.”

So there I was, cramped in the space behind the pilot, sitting on a box

with three boxes on my lap, and we were ready to take off.

This was not Cleveland Hopkins. It was a cow pasture.

I cannot accurately describe how I felt at the moment the plane started

moving.  No stewardess, no seat belts. As I told my mother in a letter later,

it was "like living history in a movie".

I didn't tell her this: Getting off the ground was harrowing. Worse than

driving through a rutted parking lot in our 38 Plymouth.

From the air we could see a battle ground painted by years of

history. Cults, tribes, nations had fought over this land. It was surreal.

Directly below was the Maginot Line. This was not a sightseeing trip for

Senior scholars. This was war, live.

No sign of the enemy, and down the hill were the remnants of the two stranded companies.

Our guys were waving at us madly. We dropped down to maybe 50 feet

and the pilot dipped his wing.

“Okay Weidenthal, open the door!" he shouted above the din of the engine.

In no time I had thrown out all three boxes. The guys waved. I closed the

door and I said to myself, “Thank God this a round trip.”

We swung around, picked up speed and flew back over the forts at a

higher altitude. By that time the Germans figured out what was going on

and were firing at us. Thankfully, we were too high.

We made three round trips, as did the other planes, without casualties

except for a hole in the wing of one of the other Pipers.

A couple of months later, as I recall, I was called to Capt. Compton's

Quarters. There he was again.

"Weedenthal, l want you to show up tomorrow morning."

“Oh my God not another rescue mission,” I thought to myself.

The next day all eight of the four little non-coms and the four pilots were

lined up on the field and a General from the Third Army decorated each of

us with an Air Medal for valor.

And for that moment I felt like a hero.

The rest is history.

Finding Leo Shore

How Two Jews and 24 Red Necks Agreed to Bury the Hatchet And Fight the Germans Instead

Through the years, my memory has often taken me back to the night in Normandy in 1944 when “Swede” Jensen held an M1 rifle on me, sputtering through a drunken haze;

“I’ve always wanted to kill a Jew. If you move you’re dead.”

I huddled in a corner paralyzed for perhaps 20 minutes (it seemed like hours) until Swede passed out in a stupor. I beat a hasty retreat to my tent in the compound where we were holed up in France as our unit was waiting to join Gen. George Patton’s Third Army, as he chased the Germans across Europe.