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wall, writing in my notebook while artillery shells whistled out of the heavens and exploded in no-man’s-land. All my fantasy lacked was a recording of “Little Bessie” playing in the background.
    Like all young men about to go to war, I did not want to hear talk about the grand illusion. If war was so bad, why did those who served in one never indicate that they regretted having done so? Think of the images conjured up by mention of the horns blowing along the road to Roncevaux. Which lays greater claim on the human heart, The Song of Roland or cloistering oneself inside inertia and ennui while the world is being set alight?
    My generational vanity was not of an arrogant kind. I didn’t mean that at all. Our vanity had its origins not only in our youth but in our collective innocence. We told ourselves we had prevailed during the Great Depression because we had kept faith with Jeffersonian democracy and had not given ourselves over to the Reds or the American equivalent of fascism. The truth about us was a little more humble in nature: We were born and raised in a transitional era; we were the last Americans who would remember a nation that was more agrarian than industrial, with more dirt roads than paved highways. We would also be the last generation to believe in the moral solvency of the Republic.
    This is not meant to be a dour evaluation of what we were or the era when we lived. In many ways, it was a grand time to be around. The cultural anchors of the continent were Hollywood on one end and Ebbets Field on the other. The literary staple of almost every middle-income American home was The Saturday Evening Post, which contained the short stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner and John O’Hara. A cherry Coke at the drugstore cost a dime, the music was a nickel, and the dance floor was free. For most of us, each sunrise was like a pink rose opening on the earth’s rim. Perhaps we created a myth and became acolytes in the service of our own creation; but if that was the case, the entire world was envious of us all the same.
    Little of what I recorded in my notebook could be considered memorable or historically insightful, even after Normandy, where we waded ashore in the second wave, the surf a frothy red from the initial assault. War is always a dirty and unglamorous business. Most of it has to do with head colds and body odor and crab lice and trench foot and sleeping in the rain and sometimes throwing your own feces out of a foxhole with your e-tool. But I never hated the army or dwelled on the unnecessary cruelties of my fellow man (Sherman tank crews knocking down farmhouses just for fun). Many of the Southerners in my regiment could hardly read and write. The Northerners believed a factory job in a unionized plant was the fulfillment of the American dream. I admired them and thought most of them were far braver and more resourceful than I. If I had to go off to war with anyone, I could not have picked a better bunch. They were always better than they thought they were, no matter how bad it got, and never realized how extraordinarily courageous and resilient they were.
    I settled in for the duration and wrote in my notebook more as a reminder of the city where I had bought it than as a process of self-discovery. I’d return to New York, I told myself. I’d have lunch with a beautiful girl in an outdoor café, under an awning, on a cool afternoon in spring, perhaps by a park blooming with flowers. I’d take her dancing, maybe in a ballroom where Tommy Dorsey and his orchestra were playing. And in the morning, I would attend classes at Columbia University, armed with the confidence that I, like Stephen Crane, had faced the Great Death and hence never had to speak of it again. Little did I know that the next few decades of my life would be altered as a result of events that began in an innocuous fashion at the bottom of a hill in the Ardennes Forest, at a time when we believed the Third Reich was