How long do you want to live anyway?

It was Thanksgiving and Jay’s daughter’s home was full of family and friends, football and food and top shelf liquor fueling honest conversation. I think Jay is around eighty, but he has aged noticeably since summer. He takes a long sip from his martini, “How do I look?”

“Very debonair, with the mustache, the paisley ascot, you look like Walter Pigeon, the actor.”

“Bullshit. I’m down to 144 pounds. An old client of mine didn’t recognize me on Walnut Street the other day. I don’t know. I haven’t tasted food for a year, though I can taste this martini. I don’t know, all I do is take pills that don’t do much.” Jay pauses, and for a moment, he is in another place, in another time. “How long you want to live anyway?”

Ventor in August

It is a perfect beach day. Brilliant sun blunted by the occasional cloud, crashing surf, cawing gulls and a cool ocean breeze. All is right with the world unless you know that you are dying and you thought it would bother you more, and your best friend of fifty years dropped dead last night.

Mr. Jay Rosenfeld, Esquire, was having a rough year. “Nothing dying couldn’t cure,” he quips.

We’re sitting in chairs at the water’s edge. This is rehearsal day for the Atlantic City Air Show. A mighty array of vintage fighters and bombers and jets, oh my. The Blue Angels in their F-18 Hornets scream over the beaches sending shockwaves straight down through the sand as well as shaking loose a few memories from Mr. Rosenfeld.

“This is fun when they’re not trying to kill you,” says Jay looking out at the horizon. “We shipped over to England in ’44. It was a great time to be young and stupid. You trained all day and played all night. I woke up every morning to this amazing sound, this mechanical roar of hundreds of B-17 Flying Fortresses revving their engines, taking off across the Channel in tight formation, like a fuckin flying Calvary charge. Very grand.

“However, when they returned, the grandeur was too often gone. They staggered back alone or in small groups, some so shot up it defied gravity they could still maintain altitude. We would see the airman in the village pubs. I think the life expectancy of a B-17 crew was like ten or eleven missions. Being young and stupid as we all were, they took a more cavalier attitude toward death having faced it, ‘How long do you want to live anyway’ was their mantra.”

Winter 1944

“The Huertgen Forest is like some amorphous leech, the forest sucked at the lifeblood of a man’s body and spirit.” C.B. MacDonald

“Nobody sleeps the night before a battle. You may only have a few hours left and you want to spend them with your eyes open. It was snowing, and my raincoat was wet and worthless, so I go back to the supply tent to get a dry one and along the way I’m thinking, ‘How the hell did I get here? I was a law student at the University of Pennsylvania. I was assigned to Naval Intelligence. But in ‘43, they were running out of fighting men, they disband my unit and I’m in the Army.

“Next thing I’m standing in my underwear, in a line when some short shit holding a clipboard asks me if I know how to type? I do not. The short shit shouts, ‘infantry’ without looking up from the clipboard.”

The crowd on the beach cheers and points as two WW II fighters simulate a strafing attack right over us. “Combat soldiers share a special bond. We’re different than guys who served in the rear. You can actually feel the air compress when a bullet whizzes past your head. It changes your outlook.”

The Battle of the Hurtgen Forest began on September 16 in a place appropriately called Deadman’s Moor and ended on December 15. Occupying a rugged and remote area on the Belgian-German border, the Hurtgen Forest is dark and dense, wet and treacherous due to the thick green fir tree canopy. The Germans understood forest fighting, dropping mortar shells into the treetops, raining down thousands of jagged slivers of metal and wood on the troops below forcing them to hug tree trucks to escape the deadly shower. There were no hard front lines, visibility could be as low as three feet in the thick brush. Then there’s the reinforced concrete pillboxes that delivered murderous fire. The Germans fortified the 30-yard-wide firebreaks turning them into a machine gun killing zone. Much of the fighting is done at hand grenade distance. The Hurtgen is a death trap, and the Germans are mystified by the American preoccupation with it.

“That night in my foxhole I had the unoriginal thought of striking a bargain with God: If you let me survive this battle, I will strive to be a good and fair man. And if I am lucky enough to have a son, I swear that he will learn how to type.”

“You concluded your prayer with a joke?”

“Joke my ass, I meant it.”

Jay is wounded when a grenade lands in the snow as he’s charges across a 30-yard-wide firebreak which the Germans had turned it into a target zone. Many are wounded, many die that morning. There were over American 33,000 casualties during the Hurtgen campaign which most historians consider one of the worst blunders in US military history.

“I open my eyes. I’m alive. I’m not cold. I see a window, green grass and hills flying past. I’m on a train. They didn’t kill me. The next thing you do is check to see if you’re all still there.”

Jay’s leg was shattered by the grenade leaving him with a daily reminder of the life he had been given that so many had been denied in the Hurtgen.

“I returned to active duty in late spring of ’45. I landed in Calais, where I finagled a jeep and drove across France to my new assignment in Vienna. I was an American officer with money in my pocket. Everybody loved me. Took about four or five weeks to reach Austria.  I had fun. The Army now ignored the fact that I still couldn’t type gave me duty more suitable for a lawyer: helping displaced people, including survivors of the concentration camps, regain their property and what was left of their lives. There was a lot of emotion and anger, draining work, and in some ways it could as tough as the Hurtgen.”

Four days after Thanksgiving, almost 60 years after the Germans failed to kill him in the Hurtgen, 2nd Lt. Jay Rosenfeld answered the question he was asked by the death-defying airmen in an English pub when they all were young and stupid. My friend was a gentle man, whose civility, humor and optimism were born out of violence, horror and death. Jay kept his foxhole bargain. I wonder how many words his son can type.