By the late 1970s, when I attended public high school in rural, blue-collar Central New York, more and more teenagers were living with a divorced parent and a stepparent—meaning, since mothers were almost always granted custody, with stepfathers. Their stories tended to erode the sugar-coating about blended families found in The Brady Bunch and other confections. Some of these stepfathers were awful. A few were monsters. Long before sociology taught us about the importance of intact homes for children, the battered lives of some of my friends amounted to a Q.E.D. all its own.
Yet statistics don’t reveal every truth. My own parents divorced soon after I was born. My mother remarried when I was five, which means that for most of my childhood and adolescence I had a stepfather, too. But he was as far from being an ogre as a man can be.
This stepfather was a man of astonishing good humor and steadiness, despite a life punctuated by many trials. He grew up in poverty on a primitive family farm. He lost his first wife to cancer early on. Decades of manual labor tested his endurance. But there was another test, the most formidable of all. He survived what 12,513 of his fellow American fighters did not: the eighty-two-day Battle of Okinawa during World War II, whose eightieth anniversary, like that of the end of World War II itself, is upon us this year.
The bloodiest battle of the Pacific theater, as well as the largest amphibious assault ever launched in that ocean and one of the largest of all time, Operation Iceberg began on April 1, 1945—which was also, that year, Easter Sunday. Lasting eighty-two days, it involved four U.S. Army and two Marine Corps divisions, a fleet of 1,300 American ships and 251 British naval aircraft, and a Commonwealth fleet including Australian, New Zealand, and Canadian ships and personnel. The Battle of Okinawa was also the occasion of the largest number of Japanese kamikaze, or suicide, attacks. More than twenty-six American ships were sunk in the waters around the island, and 168 severely damaged. Some 40 percent of the battle’s American casualties were sailors lost to those assaults.
Okinawa was “the most nightmarish experience of the entire Pacific war—over 12,500 soldiers and sailors killed, and the greatest number of combat fatigue cases ever recorded of a single American battle.” So writes Victor Davis Hanson in his introduction to With the Old Breed, a first-person account of the ground war in the Pacific by E. B. Sledge, a member of the 1st Marine Division. Suffering fifty thousand casualties during nearly three months of combat, the Allies fought a brutal, sometimes step-by-step war on the island, as the Japanese military withdrew into a labyrinth of caves and tunnels atop and within steep ridges. It was one of the fiercest battles of attrition in history.
My stepfather’s story does not appear in Tom Brokaw’s landmark 1998 tribute, The Greatest Generation, though it certainly could have. Without doubt, like the other subjects on whom Brokaw reported with such admiration, he was formed by the experience of World War II. But his story deserves sharing not only because, eighty years on, the war generation has almost vanished from the scene. Although I hardly knew it at the time, he also imparted without words a wider lesson about how to live with grace in a world so often full of tribulation—and sometimes outright evil. Now words are the only way left of honoring my late stepfather, whose circumspection about his war days I will observe posthumously by using his first name only: Roy. Or, as I knew him, Dad.
The future Private Roy was born three years before the crash, in 1926, in a hamlet at the northeast corner of Oneida County in Central New York, to a family of French-Canadian origin. He grew up in Steuben, another tiny town tucked under the Adirondacks. Named for Baron von Steuben, the Prussian officer appointed by George Washington to lead the Continental Army, this little village lies within the tract of 16,000 acres granted to the baron by the fledgling American government. His monument and tomb are a short drive from the now vanished little family farm where my stepfather grew up.
Dad’s mother, it was said, worked before her marriage as a maid at Kykuit, the Rockefeller family estate in the Hudson Valley. Her first husband died in the Spanish influenza of 1918, leaving her with two small boys; she married again a few years later and went on to have Dad, one more boy, and two girls. Dad’s mother and father spoke pidgin French, not English, and the children attended a one-room schoolhouse, still visible, albeit ancient, today. In deepest winter, my stepfather said, they would arrive there on snowshoes or homemade cross-country skis.
The farm lacked electricity for part of his childhood, and the landscape was topped with lake-effect snow for almost half the year. He and his brothers would arise at four o’clock and descend from their room in the attic to milk the family’s cows and feed whatever other animals were around. Their mother would come downstairs soon afterward, to make the day’s food from scratch, usually starting with johnnycakes, whose origins are traceable to the Pawtucket Indians. (His mother never did get used to mid-century technology. Later in life, convinced that since she could see the people on television, they could also see her, she would sit before it only if dressed in her Sunday best.) The family vehicle, during my stepfather’s early life, was a horse attached to a flatbed carriage; later they got a Model T. On Sundays, as a treat, the children would ride whatever transportation they had to a nearby town, often to pick up a new wheel of cheese. Dairy farming being the area’s main industry, family-run cheeseries were commonplace.
Dad’s family lived more like the frontiersmen of the nineteenth century than like twentieth-century Americans. But no American of his age could escape the Second World War. And so, in April 1944—one day after his eighteenth birthday and less than a year from the first landings at Okinawa—a future Army infantryman showed up in Remsen, Central New York. According to his registration card, he was five feet eleven inches tall and weighed 157 pounds, with brown hair and gray eyes.
Private Roy enlisted on December 19, 1944. Following basic training, his unit was sent to Hawaii for more drilling, and finally on across the Pacific. In 82 Days on Okinawa, another first-person account, Army Colonel Art Shaw explains, “The army whipped us into line and turned us into killing machines in only thirteen weeks. Now we were all human torpedoes, butcher boys, gunmen.”
Many sources document the inferno that raged in 1945 on that island four hundred miles from mainland Japan. Crucible of Hell, by historian Saul David, delivers in its title the gist of these war stories. By some estimates, around three thousand people were being killed on Okinawa each day. Joseph Wheelan reports in Bloody Okinawa that on April 20 alone, the 27th Army Division—my Dad’s—lost 506 men, “the greatest one-day loss of the campaign by a division.” In all, a quarter of a million people perished on the spot known today as “Japan’s Island Paradise.” And staggering though their losses were to the Allies, Imperial Japan and the indigenous islanders under its control lost far more. More than 100,000 in the Japanese military were killed or committed suicide, as did a roughly equal number of Okinawan civilians.
Statistics alone cannot capture the savagery that became synonymous with Okinawa. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers armed with massive weaponry contested amid civilians on an island smaller than the city of San Antonio. The intense concentration of men and arms was also pounded throughout by nature, including heat, monsoons, and mud, as well as by miseries of infestation such as huge flies, bloated from feeding off bodies. The result was a relentlessly putrid, polluted war zone. As one sergeant observed of the deadly struggle over a rise nicknamed Sugar Loaf Hill, which cost the 6th Marine Division thousands of casualties: “We were fighting and sleeping in one vast cesspool. Mingled with that stench was another—the corrupt and corrupting odor of rotting human flesh.”
Horrors that didn’t have a name abounded. Here is Sledge after describing a scene in which enemy artillery shells pierced through soil and mud to upend newly buried Japanese corpses, scattering maggot-ridden body parts all over a band of American soldiers: “We didn’t talk about such things. They were too horrible and obscene even for hardened veterans. The conditions taxed the toughest I knew almost to the point of screaming. . . . [It was] preposterous to think that men could actually live and fight for days and nights on end under such terrible conditions and not be driven insane.”
Death loomed everywhere—underground, on the surface, in the skies. At sea, suicide planes and suicide boats menaced the Allies constantly. On land, American soldiers saw, and did, the barely imaginable. They poured napalm into caves full of holed-up Japanese fighters and ignited them with phosphorous grenades. They manned Sherman tanks that launched enormous spires of fuel, with a reach of up to eighty yards. “The flames couldn’t be put out before they were finished burning,” notes Shaw; thereby were some of the enemy roasted alive. Titanic artillery fire rocked the island day and night, even as much of the combat remained face-to-face, and at all hours, in bunkers, pill boxes, caves, and foxholes.
Some Japanese soldiers mutilated enemy corpses. Some Americans desecrated bodies too, including by pulling katanas out of dead officers and keeping them as trophies. Nor was it only men in uniform who participated, willingly or no, in brutality. American troops watched in horror as native Okinawans, drilled in propaganda about American rape and murder, killed themselves pre-emptively by taking strychnine, or by strangling one another, or by jumping off cliffs into the sea; some also murdered their own families. Many thousands of Japanese soldiers died by suicide, especially during the last days of the war. Their methods of destruction were myriad: racing into American fire, falling onto a sword, being strangled by friends, or hugging grenades—a practice known as “poor man’s hara-kiri.”
So monstrous was the moral and human apocalypse of Okinawa that it proved a forcing crisis to two more acts of mass destruction. As death spread its dominion across land, sea, and air, President Harry Truman and his military withdrew their planned invasion of the home islands, rather than risk “Okinawa from one end of Japan to another,” as he put it. The cancellation of Operation Downfall undoubtedly saved the lives of hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of American soldiers (and Japanese soldiers, too). Its collateral damage was also fearsome, as two hundred thousand more lives—mostly civilians—were lost to atom bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9.
Even the end of the war itself, on September 2, 1945, could not erase the human devastation. For decades after the battle, reports Joseph Wheelan in Bloody Okinawa, farmers and construction workers routinely uncovered corpses still mired in the haunted soil. This was the netherworld that my stepfather, alongside his fellow soldiers and sailors and Marines and airmen, had entered on Easter Sunday 1945. Following the headlong plunge into death that was the Pacific Theater, peace descended just as suddenly, and to wild jubilation, as the war ended on September 2. Twelve million Americans in uniform returned home, and warriors were again made into family men. There was a marriage boom, and a baby boom, and picket fences were layered en masse, and speedily, over the trauma. One by one, Americans drained by the war turned away from Hades, and back to home and hearth. “For many [veterans],” as Brokaw observes, “the war years were enough adventure to last a lifetime.”
In this new domesticity, Dad’s life followed the script of the Greatest Generation. He returned to upstate New York in 1946 and married his high school sweetheart. In short order they had five children, including twin boys who would later be drafted during the war in Vietnam. For much of that time, the young veteran worked as a logger in Oregon, a region he particularly loved; he made a point of traveling to forty-eight of the fifty states, and he often told his children that Crater Lake was the most beautiful spot on earth. Following a fall from a redwood tree that broke several bones, ending his work as a lumberjack, he returned with his family to Central New York in the late 1950s—only to lose his first wife unexpectedly young, to cancer.
Sometime in the early 1960s, working as a handyman in a small nursing home near the hamlet where he grew up, this widower met my mother, a newly divorced nurse with two little girls. Two years later, they married, and they went on to have three more boys—including another set of twins, one of whom would become a career Marine. For the next three decades, my stepfather worked many jobs, often simultaneously, most of them blue-collar, scattered across a fifty-mile or so radius in rural Central New York—changing towns and hamlets as often as needed for work, or on a whim, or both, with my mother and their newly blended family.
Brokaw’s book speaks of the “self-reliance and gratitude” exhibited by the men he profiled. I would add, in my stepfather’s case, exceptional improvisation. Throughout the years, he worked variously, sometimes simultaneously, as an auto mechanic, carpenter, electrician, mason, bartender, and fix-it man. I have never known anyone as competent as he was with tools of every kind. When a back injury took him out of the heavy labor force for a year, he pivoted once more, and moved us to the upstairs of a historic, if dilapidated, tavern that he ran with my mother for a while on a defunct branch of the Erie Canal.
Adaptability, flagged by Brokaw as another characteristic of the war generation, was matched in my stepfather’s case by social energy, especially outdoors. At different times, he was an amateur stock car driver, a motorcycle enthusiast, a farm team baseball player, a square dance caller. For years he coached both my brothers’ Little League team and the softball team to which my sister and I belonged. He took all of us fishing in the region’s abundant lakes and creeks, and if we didn’t learn patience from him, it wasn’t for want of example; no one was ever more content to stand by water’s edge for hours on end, waiting. Like most men in the region, he also hunted occasionally—but only if he kept the kill for food. It was said that the former Private Roy was an exceptional shot.
He was a man’s man, in the best sense, with infectious confidence, a favorite among his peers in an age when manliness was prized. Even in explosive situations, he maintained an epic cool. Once, when a local boy stepped out of line with one of his kids, Dad called the offender and his father into our kitchen as I hid around a corner, watching. As the nervous, unwilling guests entered, my stepfather took his Buck hunting knife from its sheath, placed it on the table with no explanation, and informed them both in a low voice that there would be no more transgressions. And there weren’t. (This scene, buried in memory for decades, resurfaced only recently, when I first heard Rodney Atkins’ popular country song, “Cleaning This Gun”—which makes the same point.)
Like his fellow veterans, my stepfather’s postwar course, and my mother’s, too, were worlds removed from the collapse of American community described in Robert Putnam’s 2000 study, Bowling Alone. Though we moved often—nine times in thirteen years—my parents were popular in every village and town where we landed, and they ran in convivial circles. Since most families in that time and place couldn’t afford babysitters, the adults’ social life was ours, too. Card games like pitch, poker, hearts, and rummy, played with rotating family and friends of all ages, took us through long winter evenings. Cigarette smoke was everywhere, a toxic if indisputably common bond. Johnny Cash eight-track tapes ruled in the car. Church was another constant of the landscape, wherever we were; my brothers were altar boys, my sister and I sang in choirs. We also marched in a drum and bugle corps that paraded through quaint tiny towns.
In summertime, like other local families, we were regulars at “field days”—open-air festivals of rides and carnival games by day that turned, by night, into dancing and drinking marathons. And though other kids sometimes dreaded the evening hours, especially those whose fathers or stepfathers were drunks, our clan never had to worry. Thanks to Dad, we were always safe.
“They were proud of what they accomplished,” writes Brokaw of the veterans, “but they rarely discussed their experiences, even with each other.” Neither did my stepfather, for the most part, so the handful of exceptions bear mentioning.
One was a story about that training time in Hawaii, as he prepared with thousands of his brothers in arms to ship out. Toward the end, he told me, soldiers were granted some free time, as a break before heading off to war. Most of the guys he knew spent those unsupervised days and nights as one would expect—drinking, gambling, chasing girls. But for some reason he never offered, maybe because it couldn’t be explained, Dad chose to devote his leave time to something else: optional extra lessons in hand-to-hand combat, from an Army veteran in Hawaii who offered them on the side. Those lessons, he believed, saved his life in the foxholes to come.
He was wounded in Okinawa, lightly, three times—twice by shrapnel and once by a bullet that passed clean through his hand. Despite that, only one physical “tell” of the war’s trials remained for the rest of his life. Days spent in wet foxholes led to jungle rot, which in turn morphed into chronic psoriasis on the soles of his feet. They were excruciatingly sensitive, and everyone at home and work knew not to pass near them, even when they were protected in the thickest of steel-toe work boots.
In other ways, my stepfather departed from the generational script. Historian Allan Nevins asserted famously in 1946 that “probably in all our history has no foe been so detested as were the Japanese.” Yet oddly enough, and despite Okinawa, one would not have known this from listening to Dad. He made the point that he admired the discipline and courage of the Japanese soldiers—and he volunteered that he never took a katana out of any dead fighters, from respect. In 1980, when the televised version of James Clavell’s Shogun, a drama about Imperial Japan, became a massive hit, I gave him a copy of the book because of his fascination with things Japanese. Dad’s last grade of education was ninth. It was the only volume I ever knew him to read all the way through.
Dad also diverged on another point. Though the postwar years were marked by a religious boom that persisted into the 1960s, he bucked this trend. To be sure, he was nothing if not Catholic; he did not lean toward any other sect, and he believed, and imparted, that the Church taught truth. But rarely did he attend Mass. (Neither, for many years, did my divorced mother, until being granted an annulment.) By way of explanation, he would only say cryptically that he and God—I am quoting from indelible memory here—had “come to an agreement in a foxhole.” Even so, he saw to it that the children of the house attended regularly, including on holy days of obligation, and that we participated in parish life as well.
Like any child, I took the status quo of our household for granted, including its religious paradigm—in our case, that kids go to church and that parents who don’t will nevertheless insist on Catholic rules. Not until many years later would I realize how far from normal our family’s religious regimen was.
Though individual experiences were downplayed by adults of that time, the war itself was hardly omerta—far from it. Many of my parents’ friends were veterans. Though I don’t know of any who survived alongside my Dad, I do recall one who’d served in the European theater showing hushed respect in his presence, shaking his head gravely on hearing that word, “Okinawa.” Even so, my stepfather exhibited no visible signs of trauma; he was neither a brute, nor an addict, nor a recluse. A rare exception to his calm broke through in the early 1970s, when my mother reported his suffering a few intense episodes of hallucinatory night terrors. During them, he was insensible to all else for some long minutes, she said. The script was the same each time: sitting up suddenly in the dark, yelling the names of men she’d never heard of before, and begging those companions to “get up, get up!” Dad claimed no memory of these events. My mother believed, and she was surely right, that they were triggered by the drafting of his older two sons, one of whom had just been sent to Vietnam.
One last detail of war shared by my stepfather concerned his unit’s munitions bearer, known to us only as George. A black man, George was assigned to support services, including stretcher-bearing. (The U.S. Army would not officially integrate African-American soldiers into combat roles until 1948, when Truman signed an executive order mandating the desegregation of the armed forces. The last segregated units were not dissolved until 1954.) My stepfather always referred to George in admiring tones—in fact, “George” was the only name I recall his sharing with us from his war days. He mentioned more than once that George had courageously carried away wounded soldiers under enemy fire, and he told us—also more than once—that in his opinion, black American soldiers should have been fully armed and trained.
Though there’s no way of knowing for certain, that friendship under fire between my stepfather and George might just have had something to do with one other chapter of Dad’s postwar life—in some ways, the most remarkable of all.
In the mid-1970s, my stepfather settled into the longest-running of his many jobs: head mechanic at a “youth camp” tucked away in a sylvan corner of Oneida County. The bucolic phrase amounted to window-dressing for a minimum-security pre-prison of sorts for boys aged fourteen to seventeen, who had been sent up on various criminal charges. Most were from New York City, nearly all were fatherless, and a majority were brown or black. Too young for prison and too problematic for society, these young offenders were being held in “camp” for sentences of a year or so, in hopes of rehabilitation.
Some of the rural-born men charged with supervising these rejects of New York City held the kids in contempt—but not my stepfather. In another turn I took for granted as a child that in retrospect cries out for reflection, Dad became something else: the camp’s de facto mentor-in-chief, teaching not from the classrooms where campers were counseled by social workers with college diplomas, but instead in the garage, the place some boys seemed to like best of all. There, the practical skills he’d picked up through decades of varied work were imparted to willing campers. The list in full over the years can’t be captured here. But several of the boys whom my stepfather took under his wing, episodically signing them out of custody and into our homes for dinner, as a treat, remain vivid in memory.
One was Diamond, a small, scarred Puerto Rican boy from the Bronx. He was caught at the age of fourteen having stolen $4,000 worth of loot (about $23,000 today), to qualify for membership in the local gang. Diamond was quick to learn about engines, Dad reported. With no real home to go back to, he ended up staying longer than most in the camp and hence had extra time with my stepfather. One of the nights Diamond came to dinner, my mother surprised him with a cake for his fifteenth birthday. On seeing it, as I will never forget, this tough son of Gotham broke down crying like a toddler. No one had ever celebrated his birthday before. Eventually, Diamond returned to New York and worked as a mechanic for some years.
Another of my stepfather’s proteges was an African-American boy named Lloyd. Born and raised in Harlem, he was one of the few campers with no real criminal record. A fearful mama’s boy, by his own description, he was sent to camp for truancy after refusing to join the local gang, whose leader had threatened to break both his thumbs. My stepfather tutored this protege in tools, including how to use a chainsaw to fell trees. (Though as Lloyd pointed out in our house one afternoon, if he took that skill to Central Park, he’d be arrested again.) Humorous and outgoing, Lloyd was a family favorite, and he, too, stayed in touch for years after returning home.
Not all the campers fared well. Jed, a white boy from the Hudson Valley, whom my stepfather assessed as possibly the most skilled thief in all the institution, also hung around the garage. Shortly after being discharged, he was arrested again for something serious and sent on to real prison, not camp. Then there was Jimmy, a thin African-American boy from Bedford-Stuyvesant, at that time one of the worst neighborhoods in all New York. Quiet and observant, with knife scars on his face, Jimmy shadowed my stepfather for months and was another sometime guest in our home. Dad thought Jimmy promising and talked to him, and about him, often. Then, the night after returning to the city, Jimmy was killed in a knife fight over a card game. Half a century later, Dad’s grief on hearing that news reverberates. One death too many, Jimmy’s end marked a close to the itinerant hospitality in our home of some of New York City’s spurned sons.
Early in the 1970s, some of the boys rioted, momentarily imperiling the extended property and its authorities. Throughout that day, fires were set in the main building and elsewhere, and campers armed with improvised weapons roamed the grounds. Their ringleader, an imposing young man named Rico, entered the camp’s garage without permission along with several others, only to find my stepfather at his metal desk amid the camp’s vehicles.
The potential for destruction in that moment must have been prodigious. Buses and trucks were on hand to be stolen or vandalized; tools could easily have turned into weapons; and all that stood between the boys and the garage was a single, unarmed man—Dad. As he told the story, a Western-type standoff ensued in the garage that day. Rico surveyed the scene in silence for a few tense moments while his followers stood still, waiting for a sign. Finally, Rico ordered, “This is Roy’s place. Leave it alone.” And so the marauders did, rendering the garage the only major site left unmolested.
The shepherding of so many boys remains an extraordinary record of voluntary, unremunerated mentorship—the more so for Dad’s patent indifference to race, or color, at a time when indifference was anomalous. Nor did he seem perturbed by the unsavory circumstances that landed his charges upstate in the first place. On the contrary, he mixed the boys from time to time among his own wife and children—as effortlessly and as unconcernedly, one might say, as he mixed my sister and me with his own kids, along with the parade of neighbors and friends and other stray souls who came and went from our homes, wherever we were living at the moment.
My stepfather likely never encountered the Jesuit motto, “a man for others.” He just lived it. At eighty-six years old and in his right mind, as ever, he took himself off dialysis, knowing the decision would end his life within weeks. He filled those remaining hours surrounded by family and friends. A few days before dying, he had breakfast with an old buddy and told him with a grin, “Vinnie, this is it! This week I’m going to heaven.” No one listening had a dry eye. Except Dad, unflappable as usual.
Not long ago, I read for the first time J. Glenn Gray’s classic 1959 study of the psychology of combat, The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle. I was especially taken by the author’s thoughts on what he calls the “ache of guilt” carried by soldiers after war. That ache, Gray observes, has far-reaching consequences. Some men are driven mad by what war has made them do. Others follow a different route toward oblivion, and long for death themselves. Still others escape by throwing themselves into sensualism, a life of distracting pleasures. In measuring those possibilities against my dad, I find that none fit the bill. But there was one other response remaining on the list.
If a soldier is strong enough, says Gray, “Atonement will become for him not an act of faith or a deed, but a life, a life devoted to strengthening the bonds between men and between man and nature.” I thought back to Brokaw’s book about my Dad’s generation. Atonement: That word goes missing in action from the Greatest Generation narrative. Yet it might, in the end, help to explain not only my stepfather’s vibrant postwar years, but by extension, those of the many other souls scarred in the Second World War whose lives became so justly admired.
After all, with atonement comes grace; and grace, more than any other factor, is surely the invisible filament binding together the pages of my stepfather’s story—a grace that appears even to have pierced some of those around him, protecting them against harmful rays of the age. Because of Dad, small knots of working-class people and their kids found genuine community. Because of him, some thrown-away boys, abandoned by everyone else, had a shot at rejoining society. Because of him, a single mother gained a second chance at marriage and family; and two girls who weren’t even his, one of them this author, would dodge the grim arithmetic of a ruptured home and know a father’s steadfast love.
What, besides grace, can make sense of Roy’s life? Somehow, inexplicably, this rural white man of his time remained completely untainted by racial prejudice. Somehow, just as unlikely, boys intent on violence one day passed him by. Somehow, mirabile dictu, a bunch of kids whose parents didn’t attend church were raised Catholic. And somehow, a soldier who suffered and took part in one of the grisliest battles on modern record retained not only a lifelong respect for his enemy, but in the end, a certainty about his own reward.
With all due appreciation for Tom Brokaw, The Greatest Generation misses something essential. Maybe the remarkable accomplishments of yesteryear’s veterans, many as unknown to the larger public as my Dad’s, were driven in part by something unseen. That supernatural evil has a hand in the destruction known as war has never been hard to entertain. Less visible is something we’re told is also true: that where sin abounds, grace may come to abound more.
Neither I nor most of those reading this have served in combat or been driven to kill—let alone been part of an annihilation like the Battle of Okinawa. But all of us, in the community of sinners, are just as much in need of atonement and charity as were the soldiers described by Gray. And maybe that is the final lesson left by the Greatest Generation, a lesson that soars beyond the war years, and the postwar years, into eternity: Only love, and love’s propitiation, make possible for any of us a shot at that ultimate victory, redemption.
