Episode 1, Sc. 3 – Entering the Fray
Six weeks later, August 2004 Baton Rouge, LA.
I’m standing in the doorway of the banquet room of the Baton Rouge Holiday Inn looking over the heads of 510 strangers - WWII veterans and their families – who are sitting at tablecloth covered dinner tables listening to a middle aged General - blue dress uniform gold piping - at a podium by the front table as he welcomes them, “The Iron Men of Metz, to “the first dinner of this 59th reunion of the 95th Infantry Division.
Cheers “Now men, Enjoy your dinners.
That’s a command”
Laughter
I wave from the doorway. “Excuse me.. Excuse me.”
General looks up, heads turn, diners swivel in their seats..
“Oh yes.. A son of a veteran has an announcement, Go on.. uh …
Who are you?”
Laughter
David.. David O’Shea Meyer. My father was one of you and he died just after the last reunion.
I came here for the candlelighting on Sunday.. maybe you saw the flyer I passed out when you were registering?.... . Well, tonight … tonight and every night of the reunion I’ll be just outside this room at a table in the corridor ready to record any story you have about your service.... And I give it back to you for free on a compact disk in memory of my Dad, Earl D Meyer Co H/379th.
Umm.. uh Thanks.. thanks for listening and have a nice dinner.”
Scattered applause.
As I back into the corridor, pulling the door closed, I hear someone say, “Well That’s over.”
Laughter
I walk ten steps to a six-foot long Masonite topped table and doublecheck the placement of my CD recorder, my mike and backup cassette recorder.
I unfold three metal chairs position them “just so” at the table two on the open
corridor side of the table and mine at the back near the wall.
I now I sit and I wait
Listen to clinking plates and glasses through the closed doors behind me
I read over my list of questions for Veterans. Read it again. Be Prepared
And I wait.
Two hours later:
Doors fling open, corridor fills with
Old men in sport coats calling over heads, “Hey, Bob…Bob.. Over here, it’s Kid”.
“Hey you look good, pal.” .. their wives long dresses, middle-aged children, grandchildren running through legs..– five hundred people laughing, everyone’s hugging . Noisy. Bustling.
I sit at my table, watching this commotion, smiling, hopeful like a teenage wallflower at a high school prom waiting to be asked to dance. I look from veteran to veteran and if I catch an eye, I point to my empty chairs.
Nobody sits.
General’s voice rises over the crowd’s din: “The Swing Band Starts Playing in 15 minutes in The Bayou Room Two doors down to the right. The Bayou Room
We’ll start in 15 minutes.
And Have Fun..
That’s an order.”
“Yeahhhh” says the Crowd as it breaks up, moves down the corridor
Leaving one man standing
Tall, slight smile, sandy white hair.
He walks up to the table.
“Fred. Fred Love.”
I point to the chair. He shakes head “no” keeps standing.
“I don’t want to be recorded but
I liked your Daddy so I’ll tell you a story.”
He looks around checking. Just the two of us.
He looks down at me and says softly,
“There were sixteen of us and three hours later, there were five of us left.”
He looks up and to his left and stares into the empty space in front of him stares into some middle distance
and travels back in time.
I feel something in me something rising up, rising up pulling me out of Baton Rouge.
And I follow him.
Into the mud. To 1944.
He’s the squad sergeant in a rifle platoon who’ve fought for weeks through NE France and Germany
and this day
this day
His men were on patrol in a forest scouting for Germans when they walk out of the woods into a grassy field
where an enemy machine gun nest hides, waiting for them.
The German guns open up, bullets raking across his men cutting them down, slaughtering them. picking them off like rabbits...like rabbits.
He’s hit in the arm and stomach and one of his men another sergeant slings him over his shoulder and carries him out.
He says that after the war, when he returned to his old job at Armco Steel in Tennessee how he wanted to tell the foreman he just replaced about what he’d seen in the war, what stayed in his dreams
That man who had never gone to war said, “Fred, All you World War Two guys come back with your stories and you’re all full of crap. Keep it to yourself.“
and Fred says, “And I didn’t tell anyone anything else for 12 years.”
Jesus, I thought. That’s how it worked. Not that no one talked about the war, but that they tried to talk but no one knew how to listen so they clammed up.
But they tried. One time, they tried.”
I’m learning stuff now.