A Veteran's Tale: D-Day and Beyond

 

Allow me to tell this story of one of The Greatest Generation who didn't fall in battle ... because many, many of his buddies did. And we must not recall the war dead without remembering the survivors.

I had the honor of knowing Charlie Grech, a gentleman who served as an ambulance driver in WWII. He was in the D-Day landing on Normandy Beach. He immigrated to the U.S. as a boy, from Malta. It was during the early days of the Great Depression, so he went right to work, earning a few cents per day. He couldn't speak English then, he said, and wound up eating pea soup at a diner every day for nearly a month because he didn't know how to order a sandwich.

When he finally learned to say "ham sandwich", the waiter asked him "white bread or wheat?" He answered, "Pea soup." But he learned, and kept working whenever he could, into the early 1940s. Then the draft notice arrived.

After basic training, his company was sent to the Mojave Desert to train for North Africa. That campaign was over before they got called up. But Operation Overlord was coming up.

"I've never been so scared in my whole life," he told me. "I thought I was gonna wet my pants. Some guys did, but we all got wet when we got out of the landing craft, so it didn't matter. The bullets sounded like mosquitos, except worse than you could imagine. Guys were getting chopped to pieces. Sometimes you couldn't even recognize 'em after they got hit."

Later, he participated in the Battle of the Bulge. 

"Every couple of hours, there'd be another rumor coming down the line that the Nazis had broken through, or that they'd infiltrated this unit or that one, or that we were cut off from the rest of the guys. I just kept picking up the wounded guys, and driving 'em back to where they needed to go. If a Kraut wanted to shoot me, he was welcome to try. Whenever I was scared, I'd just drive a little faster. So I drove fast a lot."

Charlie was an inspiration to me: just a normal guy whose family came to the States in search of opportunity. He never finished high school, and when he got called by Uncle Sam, he went. He had a job to do, and he did it. No crying, no fuss; he got the job done, and came back home.

"I was lucky," he said. "A lot of guys didn't make it back." But Charlie did.

He came back and married his best girl, Marcella, right after the war. Charlie worked in a factory until he retired. Marcella was a cook at an elementary school. For all that they had little education, they provided for a son who literally became a rocket scientist, working at White Sands when I met him.

When they retired, they lived in a small but tidy mobile home, in an equally-small subdivision out in the country. Charlie spent a lot of time sitting on the front porch, waving at the cars as people drove past. He always had a kind word for anyone who'd stop to talk. 

We lived across the street from Charlie and Marcella for nearly 12 years. Every day after work, I'd head over and have a long talk with him. Marcella would join us, most days. He always had a funny story to tell. The few times that he mentioned the war, he'd start to shake, even after all those years.

We moved away nearly thirty years ago. My in-laws mentioned them, from time to time, as they had mutual friends. I always wanted to go back and see him, but there never seemed to be time to travel all that way. Then we moved to Alaska, and that was the end of that.

Charlie passed away about 20 years ago. Marcella moved to a senior community and passed away 10 years later.

Rest in peace, Charlie. I'm richer for having known you, and we owed you far more than we could ever repay.