Prelude

It's just after lunch, and they're moving into the auditorium-not quite a hundred of them. They're high school students in jeans and Tommy Hilfiger sweatshirts. Carrying books, chatting and laughing, they take their seats. Down in front, at the bottom of the descending rows of theater-style seats, sit three elderly men in outdated olive drab military uniforms. They're facing the students from behind a long table. Arrayed across the front of the table, facing the students, is a vast Nazi flag-a sea of blood red with a white circle in the center in which is displayed a twisted cross of black. Atop the flag stretched across the tabletop are maps, photographs, samples of military equipment issued to soldiers in an earlier time and, incongruously, a battered silk top hat.

Niskayuna High School serves an upscale community several miles northwest of Albany, N.Y. It's generally considered one of the best of the suburban high schools in the Albany metro area. That's largely because it draws so many of its students from the home of well-educated professionals, many of whom work at reasonably high levels in New York state government. Or the parents are highly trained employees of General Electric in sophisticated technical research facilities in the area. In general, Niskayuna High School students live comfortable lives. They enjoy the best of what early 21st Century America has to offer young people from relatively prosperous families. On this crisp, sun-splashed winter day, they are about to learn what life served up to members of an earlier generation who, at roughly the same stage in life, were living vastly different lives.

Warriors are members of a unique society. They know things that others do not know. They have endured triumphs, travails and tragedies that are essentially incomprehensible to those who have not suffered through the harrowing, soul-searing experience of combat. As they banded together on the battlefield, so do warriors tend to band together in the life that follows-in veterans groups, in parades, at funnels. They tend not to discuss their experiences with those who have not shared them-with people who have not seen what they saw, done what they've done, felt what they've felt or had inflicted upon them both the horrors of warfare and the demons of memory. World

War II veterans in particular have been a close-mouthed lot in the decades since V-E Day and V-J Day. For the most part, they went to war as children and returned home as men-sadder and wiser and uniquely equipped to put the horror behind them and to build the brawniest economy the world has ever known. It is only now, as the surviving warriors of World War II are dying off at a rate of 1,000 a day, that some of these gallant old men are breaking a lifetime's silence. For some of this remarkable, vanishing generation, it's important to at last share their special understanding of how ugly life can be-and how precious it is-and what it can demand of those confronted by challenge that cannot be ignored.

As the group quiets, a teacher introduces the three. Doug Vink is the first to rise. Smallish, white-haired, bespectacled and wiry, he picks up a hand microphone attached to the auditorium's sound system. To his right, Richard Marowitz and Al Cohen sit quietly. These three septuagenarians have done this before. For several years, they've been visiting schools as varied as thriving Niskayuna and Tryon, state-run school for juvenile criminals, to explain what life was like when they were young. The world of their youth was a profoundly unlovely place, and what Vink, Marowitz and Cohen did in those years paved the way for the security and comforts enjoyed nearly six decades later by these kids in their sleek suburban high school. Vink, Marowitz and Cohen were in the thick of terrible times, and they want these young people to understand what they might, at some point, be called upon to endure themselves.

"The reason I'm first," Doug Vink says into the microphone, "is that I'm the youngest, and I'm the best looking of the group."

A titter of laughter runs through the assembled students. The microphone in his left hand, Vink paces back and forth behind the table.

"It would be unfair of me," Vink says, "to take you people right now and drip you right in the middle of the Bulge. So I'll back up to a month before."

He then gives the students a brief overview of the events leading up to the Battle of the Bulge-of the immense bloodshed on both sides after Allied troops landed at Normandy, of the fierce combat that led the Allied brass to mistakenly conclude that the German army was finished, of the terrified French refugees who later folded to Allied lines with stories of huge Nazi armies massing to the north-refugees who simply hadn't been believed.

And then, Vink tells the students, just before Christmas, the Germans spat out their answer to the Allied invasion. In massive force, they counterattacked with an intensity that no one had expected. They tore into the Allied forces with the hard-eyed resolve of desperate men who knew that only they stood between the invading enemy troops and their homeland. The Germans stopped backing up. Instead, they charged forward, and the Allies were back. The Battle of the Bulge was in full swing in a clash to the death in waist-deep snow.

"They had the best equipment," Doug Vink tells the students solemnly," the greatest equipment. And I will tell you right now, and these other two fellows will probably agree with me, don't underestimate what the German army had during World War II. They were better equipped and better trained and more disciplined that we were. We went like idiots because we were told to do it. We didn't know any better.."

Continue to Chapter 1 >>