Rex Raney carefully stepped into the top of a Humvee at an armory of the Colorado Army National Guard. He took a look through its optical gadgetry, so powerful that you could detect the movement of a stray cat on a mountain two miles away in the dark, as if it were two feet in front of your nose in daylight. A soldier explained that the Humvee's TOW weapons system could hit a target at that distance with enough firepower to pop a Russian tank off the ground like a champagne cork.
Then Raney and the rest of us were led into a room with an enormous videoscreen and modern semiautomatic weapons outfitted with compressed air. Raney, along with his one-time comrade Karl Mann, fired bursts of air at the digital terrorists on the screen, as young soldiers helped them re-load their weapons.
There was something jarring about showing these men modern weaponry and modern defenses, but they seemed to be having fun. Raney, 93, and Mann, 90, were members of the 157th infantry unit in World War II. They and their comrades cut a bloody scythe through Europe over 511 days of combat, the longest continuous stretch of fighting for any unit in the war. They went through Sicily, Salerno, Anzio, and southern France. They engaged in street-fighting in Munich, and finally liberated the concentration camp at Dachau.
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Raney had been in the unit from the beginning. Mann had joined the 3rd battalion at Anzio, and because he was fluent in German, he became General Felix Sparks' interpreter at Dachau.
Last weekend's event was the final annual reunion of the 157th regiment association. Reunions that had drawn scores of men as recently as a decade ago, now drew only these two. My father-in-law and I attended in the name of his father, who was a replacement brought into the regiment a short time before the liberation of Dachau.
Indeed, the 157th association was notable for the way it retained and welcomed descendants. Our hosts were the current 157th regiment, of the Colorado Army National Guard, the same state National Guard that had been federalized into the war. At their military ball, which coincided with the reunion, members of the current 157th who wanted to re-enlist took their oath from Karl Mann, whose very location at the Battle of Anzio is illustrated on the walls of the armory. The current 157th's embrace of the veterans association transformed what had been a more informal drinking session into an event of real grace and solemnity for the old veterans and young warriors.
At a welcome barbecue in the home of Lieutenant Commander Brey Hopkins, I met the English journalist and historian Alex Kershaw. He has authored a number of books on World War II, including The Liberator, which is about Felix Sparks. We joked about the impending fate of his Aston Villa soccer team. And about the fact that in the end Germany conquered Europe with a currency, not the Panzer.
When I observed to him that despite all the soapy movies, books, and babble about the Greatest Generation, I could still see some ambivalence about the war on the part of its veterans, Kershaw turned his body to me and quietly but forcefully spoke about the ruins from the Battle of Britain that still existed in his childhood. He spoke of how the efforts of men like Karl Mann and Rex Raney secured for him a European identity, and a life lived in the longest period of prosperity and peace in all of modern European civilization.
And suddenly it dawned on me that his career as a writer was a not just a smart gig for a talented journalist and stylist, but a genuine effort to honor this astounding gift. I could feel some of my anti-war sympathies, which even extend to the America First Committee of the 1930s, slightly unmooring as he spoke. He sounded the same themes to the entire association and current 157th the next night.
The 157th's final reunion also attracted Randy Palmer, a Vietnam vet and member of the Kiowa Black-Leggings Warrior Society. His father had served in the 158th field artillery battalion, and he had nothing but kind words for the 157th. Palmer's seven uncles had fought in World War II. Palmer has a voice as deep as David Carradine's but with a rounded Oklahoma lilt. He gave traditional Kiowa gifts to the surviving vets in one of the more touching moments of the weekend.
The enthusiasm of an Englishman and a member of the Kiowa for a regiment only tenuously connected to either of them was an incredible tribute to the 157th and their men. The reunion was a parade of tears. The secretary of the 157th association cried at what he called his "sad but prideful duty" of addressing the last reunion. The chaplain of the current 157th drew sobs from around the room when he recounted a recent visit to Dachau, where, as word traveled around that the men there represented the camp's liberators, a woman approached them to explain that she had been one of the "hidden" babies their forebears had discovered that awful day 70 years ago.
And I cried, too. I suppose because for one minute my generation's protective irony dropped away from me, and I wondered whether my country will ever know men like these again.
