Doug Bruns

Search for “ardennes forest”

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Captain Douglas

In Family, Memoir on February 9, 2013 at 6:33 am
Shoulder patch of the 99th Infantry Division

Shoulder patch of the 99th Infantry Division

We’re having a hell of a snow storm here in Maine. It made me think of this post I put up several years ago. (It’s a bookend to the post put up a couple of weeks ago, Foxhole Stoicism) :

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December, 1944: My father, and much of the 99th Infantry Division, is trapped behind lines–the Battle of the Bulge.  After sunset, snow knee-deep and falling in the black of the Ardennes Forest, he puts his hand on the shoulder of the solider in front of him, as does the man in front of him, and the man in front of him, and so on. The snake of trapped men silently move through the snow and the woods to the safety of morning light across the river. They do not completely escape detection. As the sun rises, the enemy awakes to discover their trail; rifles secured they follow in pursuit. The line breaks as some of the men are shot. The Germans close in. Dad crosses the river and survives.

My father does not like to talk about it.

I am named after the Captain who led the men out of the darkness, a man who stood at the sharp-end with compass and pen light and confidence. It was the highest honor my father could bestow the man who had saved his life, the gift of naming his son. We are escapees, shuffling through the winter night terrorized. As I have said elsewhere, I am given to metaphor and this is a strong one. As best I know, the human species has no call to origins, to a place of conception. We lack the comfort of a natal stream. There is longing, however. Who does not long for a pen light in the darkness, a leading shoulder or a compass? How can we resist the clearing across the river?

The storm rages and we cannot be ambivalent about being surrounded.

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Foxhole Stoicism

In Death, Family, Life, Philosophy on January 17, 2013 at 6:00 am
Dad (and me in mirror)

Dad (and me in mirror)

My father is ninety years old and has a cold. It is an annual event, his cold. The rest of the year he remains healthy, but for a bit of arthritis and type-two diabetes. My father is stoic, though he could not necessarily tell you what stoicism is. He will tell you, however, that the classroom for this life lesson was a fox hole in the Ardennes Forest in 1943. Why define a concept when your life exemplifies it?

He surprised me yesterday during our visit. “I’m not afraid of death,” he said. “It’s dying that worries me.” My father does not typically talk this way, again the stoicism. But over the recent years he’s said enough to let me know that it is a subject he now entertains. He looked at me keenly.

“It’s been said, dad, that you’re either afraid of death, or your afraid of dying.” I didn’t bother to elaborate on other insights of Julian Barnes. He nodded. “It’s the suffering,” he said, before changing the subject.

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Marcus Aurelius

Marcus Aurelius

“The act of dying is one of the acts of life,” said the great Stoic, Marcus Aurelius (121 AD – 180 AD). He also preached the comfort of ignorance that is the void of pre-existence, birth, with the existential ignorance that will be the void of post-existence, death. That is, you didn’t fret over your non-existence before you were born, why would you fret over your non-existence after your demise?

I subscribe to this way of thinking and find a modicum of comfort in it. But I’ve recently discovered that there is a third concern in dying, not summarized in Barnes’s observation, nor taken up by the Stoics. (For the record, on death, I am not Woody Allen. Concerns of my eventual extinction do not color my thoughts all day long. But, like my father, as my days advance, so does my thinking on the subject.)

The American philosopher, Mark Johnston, makes this observation (as related in the book I finished reading last night, Why Does the World Exist? by Jim Holt): “The prospect of one’s own most [sic] death is perplexing and terrifying because it reveals that we are not, as we supposed, the fountainhead of the reality we inhabit, the center of the world..” Truthfully, who can’t help but fall into this trap, the concept of being at the center of the reality we inhabit? We have no other way in which to experience the world. He then delivers the body-blow: “It turns out that I am not the sort of thing I was unconsciously tempted to think I was.” How deeply we have given into that temptation seems, to me, proportional to the degree of terrifying perplexity death elicits.

“Know thyself,” advised the Oracle at Delphi. I attempt to march to this admonition, but stumble over what this self actually might be. Johnston’s observation underscores my inkling that at the root of this conundrum is the concept of the self–a concept that gets in the way and ultimately trips us up. It is not surprising that Holt closes Why Does the World Exist?, with an observation by a Buddhist monk: “The world is like a dream, an illusion. But in our thinking, we transform its fluidity into something fixed and solid-seeming.” It was the Buddha, lest we forget, who observed the self as a false concept.

Thanks for reading,

d

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We are all escapees. (A repost from 2009)

In Adventure, Memoir, The Examined Life on May 7, 2012 at 6:00 am

My father was trapped behind lines in the Battle of the Bulge. After sunset, deep in the black of the Ardennes Forest he was instructed to put his hand on the shoulder of the solider in front of him, as did that man, and the man in front of him. The snake of trapped men silently moved through the snow and the woods to the safety of morning light across the river. They did not completely escape detection. As the sun rose, the enemy awoke to discover the trail, grabbed their rifles and rushed in pursuit. Some of the men were shot as the Germans closed in. My father does not like to talk about it.

I am named after the Captain who lead the men out of the darkness, a man who stood at the sharp end with compass and pen light and confidence. It was the highest honor my father could bestow on the man who saved his life.

We are escapees, shuffling through the winter night terrorized. As I have said elsewhere, I am given to metaphor and this is a strong one. As best I know, the human species has no call to origins, to a place of conception. There is longing, however. Who does not long for a pen light in the darkness, a leading shoulder or a compass? How can we resist the clearing across the river?

We cannot be ambivalent about being surrounded.

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The Heros.

In Death, Family on May 30, 2010 at 7:54 am

I was thirteen at the on-set of the Tet Offensive. But it was several years prior to Tet, that I realized people die early waging war. I say die early in the context of the individual life, that men and scores of women and children, all still carrying the imprint of youth, expire and with them the potential of their lives. I recall discovering this and being shocked by it. Life, I reasoned, was so dear that surely it could not end like that for means so questionable. But it did. And still does. War is a fact of history. It is, too, likely a certitude of the future. But I am not writing to moralize on war. It is Memorial Day, the day we commemorate the men and women who died in military service.  That war is the practice of death and dying is a sobering realization and we do well to remind ourselves of this by honoring those who have been subjected to it.

I am named after a Captain Douglas, 99th Infantry Division. Captain Douglas got my father out of the Ardennes Forest after the Germans broke through the lines in the winter of 1944. The Captain delivered him, and many others trapped and waiting in their foxholes, to safety, snaking them through the forest and escaping. The Battle of the Bulge is the single largest battle of World War II. More than a million men–600,000 Germans, 500,000 Americans, and 55,000 British–were engaged. There are estimates of up to 200,000 casualties for both sides.

Many years later I contacted the Department of the Army and replaced the Bronze Star my father had been awarded during the war. It had been stolen. He was not interested necessarily in replacing it, and had let the war recede in memory. The paperwork that accompanied the replacement called my father a hero. He was moved when I gave it to him. He was polite in accepting it and seemed touched by the gesture. A few days later I got a letter from him. In it he said he was not a hero, as the service record claimed. The heroes, he said, where the one’s who did not return.