Every Man a Hero

by Ray Lambert

  It wasn’t the sort of ship a GI from Alabama would ordinarily sail on, that’s for sure.

  The liner had been converted into a troopship after the war started, and sailed everywhere from Sydney, Australia, to Bombay, India, before settling in as an American-run transport going back and forth between the U.S. and England. Painted gray, she remained one of the fastest liners on the ocean.

  The drab paint scheme earned her a new nickname: the Gray Ghost. Inside you could see traces of her former beauty, though these were often hidden behind something more utilitarian. There was a beautiful set of stairs leading down to the first-class dining room, now a mess hall for the enlisted men. Bunks now filled the cabins—every cabin, not just the third class. Hammocks were hung in the theater. Any area that could be used for passengers was taken with some sort of sleeping gear.

  Though I didn’t work in the ship’s well-equipped hospital this voyage, I was given a cabin to share near it. That spared me having to fight my way below for meals and whatnot; we were fed there, in relative luxury.

  I’m not sure what I did to earn the privilege. Possibly they thought I could take care of the other fellows if their wounds or ailments gave them trouble. I didn’t ask; I’d long ago realized you don’t question certain things in the army.

  * * *

  After we docked in New York, I was taken to a hospital in Manhattan for evaluation. It was a standard stop; doctors would check us over and then send us to another facility to continue rehabbing.

  I was hurting, but could get around on my own—slowly but surely. Soon after arriving, I went down to the lobby to use the telephone. So did half the hospital, or at least it seemed that way. I must have waited on line several hours before it was my turn.

  I called my parents. After a very brief conversation, telling them that I was okay and was in the States, I asked where Estelle was.

  “Her folks.”

  “Can you give me the number?” I asked.

  I dialed pretty quickly, nervous all of a sudden; she knew I was on my way, but it had been so long since we talked. And no matter how sure you are of someone and their love for you, there’s always some little piece of nagging doubt.

  Does she really want me back?

  Estelle’s sister Becky, our old chaperone, answered the phone.

  “Is Estelle there?” I asked.

  “Who is this?”

  “It’s Ray.”

  “Ray’s home!” Becky shouted. “Ray’s home!”

  Estelle was overjoyed. We talked for quite a while. I told her about the injuries, how badly I wanted to see her, how I was going to get better in no time.

  “Can I come see you?” she asked.

  “No,” I said. “They’re going to move us in a day or so.”

  I told her I would call her as soon as I was moved.

  The next day, an aide brought a woman and a young boy to see me.

  It wasn’t my wife. It was the wife of a friend. I recognized her instantly, though I hadn’t seen her in over three years.

  “Why did you let him die?” she said before I could open my mouth. “Why did you let him die?”

  “Who?” I asked.

  “Puckett,” she answered, naming a mutual friend who was part of our medical section.

  I hadn’t even known he was dead.

  She began to cry. I hadn’t even known the man was dead—I found out much later that he had been killed long after Normandy, while I was recuperating. But that was how close we all were before the war began—families.

  She began pounding my chest. I said something useless to get through the moment. Slowly, more words came. I told her I didn’t know that he’d died, and that everyone on the team would have done everything they could.

  She collapsed, crying.

  “I know. I know,” she said between sobs. “I’m sorry.”

  I told her I was sorry, too.

  * * *

  I was assigned to Finney General Hospital in Thomasville, Georgia. I had one mission—get better. My therapy largely consisted of rest.

  A few days later, Estelle and my son drove from North Carolina to see me.

  “Daddy!” he said, as soon as he saw me. “Daddy.”

  I bent to him. “How?”

  Estelle explained that they had hung my picture over his crib and then his bed from the time he was born.

  “Daddy.”

  The word melted me. I was home, and now finally the war would be over for me.

  Twelve

  The Rewards of Peace

  Getting Better

  He’s there, in front of me.

  He has a bayonet!

  Explosions and thunder and a roar so loud my skull vibrates.

  That man is drowning!

  I dodge into darkness, but someone follows. I’m in Sicily, then Africa, on the hill with the German, the bayonet slicing my hand. I plunge into a different landscape entirely—Battery Park, New York City, before the war, a fistfight in the men’s room of a bar. I find myself not in the bar but beside a wrecked airplane as a cadaver hands me something, a pipe . . .

  But I’m underwater, held there, trapped, about to die.

  Breathe! . . .

  Finally, I wake up. I’m in Florida, still in the army, convalescing. I am in absolutely no danger, but every part of my body trembles with fear.

  * * *

  I’d thought the war was over for me. I was only partly right.

  No one was shooting at me anymore. No bombs were exploding. But the war stayed with me, and stays with me still. The nightmares I had as I recovered came less and less often as the years passed, but even now I still occasionally have one, or a piece of one.

  I try not to go to sleep with bad thoughts on my mind; it helps.

  I have more coherent memories and thoughts as well. Not just of the man who tried to kill me, or the medics I worked with who died in the war, or even of the thousands of soldiers my guys and I worked on, the men we saved. I think sometimes of the lives that came after, of the children and the children’s children of the men we saved, people who would not have been here but for some mixture of bad and good luck that made my presence not only necessary but provident.

  I have been blessed.

  * * *

  I don’t know if the disjointed dreams and nightmares I had in the hospital were symptoms of post-traumatic stress. We didn’t have that diagnosis in those days; we knew the war had a psychological effect on people, but we thought of it differently than we do today. Even the doctors had a different attitude than is common these days.

  I do know a lot of guys had trouble adjusting after the war. And I know that I changed, physically and mentally, because of the war.

  I’d lost a lot of weight; I was down to 136 pounds from over 170. And I was more nervous, more likely to worry than to take life as it came.

  Some of that anxiety was justified as my time in the army came to a close. I didn’t know how I was going to support my family once I left. I was still recovering from my wounds. I had all that on me, no job, and no place where we could live.

  But I did know I had to just go ahead and get on with my life. I imagine it was like the old days when the pioneers set out with their covered wagons. They had no real knowledge about where they were going, or a deep understanding of the trials and trouble they faced.

  Most thought it would be easy: just drive out west a few weeks, find a piece of land, live happily ever after.

  Boy, were they wrong.

  I wasn’t that naïve. But I was in a kind of similar situation. I had to just grit my teeth and go on.

  Which is what I did.

  VE Day

  After Georgia, I was sent to another hospital in Florida. We found a cheap and tiny place to rent in Daytona Beach. Not only was it tiny; it had been a chicken coop before we moved in. But some of the guys from the post went in and cleaned that all up, even whitewashed the walls. There was no electricity or running water; to use the bathroom we had to go into th
e landlady’s house, which fortunately was right next door. There was no door to close when we moved in; I had to buy one on my own. Eventually we ran an extension cord over for light.

  And that’s how we lived for twenty dollars a month until my discharge came through in June 1945.

  I’ll say this for my landlady—she was a nice woman, and didn’t mind that we had a child, unlike many others. The town was full of signs saying soldiers with kids need not apply. People were happy to jack up the rent and take our money; in many cases that was the limit of their generosity.

  Germany had surrendered by then, formally exiting the war on May 8. Hitler committed suicide in his bunker on April 30; a few days earlier, Mussolini had been killed and hung up on a meat hook in a public square by Italian partisans.

  There were wild celebrations across America. I don’t remember joining any, though obviously I would have been pleased and thankful that the war was over. I had other things on my mind.

  My brother had been discharged as well. He’d kept his leg and arm. I knew he would. He had that kind of will.

  He’d found work with an electrical company in Massachusetts and suggested I could, too. That sounded like a good idea. Estelle and I took our son and a newly acquired dog, bought a cheap car and a trailer, and set out for the North. We had a $275 stake—all the money left from my discharge and savings.

  I didn’t know my wife, and she didn’t know me. It wasn’t just that we hadn’t seen each other in three years, or that we’d gotten married very young.

  We’d both changed. Me, because of the war. And her because of the war as well.

  Less directly, of course. But the war had kept her husband away, and left her to raise an infant without him. The fact that this happened to many other women across the country didn’t make it any easier, just as the fact that there were a million other guys in the army didn’t really help me either.

  She was patient as well as loving. Those two things don’t always go together, but in Estelle they did. And that made our marriage and life together thrive.

  She would never, ever argue with me; she never yelled at me that I can remember. She never said a bad word to me, called me any kind of name, or told me she was unhappy about things. If she’d been someone else, I might not have made it.

  * * *

  We settled in Waltham, Massachusetts. I got a job as an electrician’s helper; at night I’d go to school to get certifications that would allow me to do bigger jobs and earn more money. There was a drugstore across from where we had a little apartment; I took a part-time job cleaning it, washing and wiping the floors and counters and everything for a dollar. On Saturdays I worked for a guy who had some odd jobs and needed wood to heat his house, which in a funny way brought me full circle back to the wood business. I’d spend a few hours cutting down trees and splitting them into firewood.

  I took any work I could find. If I wasn’t doing anything, fifty cents was more than I had in my pocket.

  It took a little while for me to get the knowledge and experience I needed, but by the early 1950s I was ready to go out on my own in the electrical field. I moved out to Westwood, Massachusetts, hired a couple of guys, bought a bucket truck or two, and went to work.

  My early customers included a large dairy; I was back on the farm, in a way. The business kept expanding. Besides servicing factories and warehouses for companies like Coca-Cola, we hired out to Boston Edison to help get electricity back on following the storms. Nothing like being in a war, but pretty demanding and potentially dangerous.

  The business grew very successful; so good, in fact, that in the 1960s I bought out two competitors and eventually found myself running a good-sized company. There was time for fun, too—snowmobiling in the winter, for example. Estelle and I and Arthur and Linda had a blast.

  Linda—my daughter. She was born in 1951 and, as the saying goes, was the apple of her father’s eye. I was able to spend time with the kids as they grew up, and found myself volunteering in the Scouts with my son and helping establish the first girls’ softball league in our local area.

  There’s a bit of me that’s an inventor and tinkerer, I guess, and as I was working in the field, I realized that the heat generated by large electrical motors could be put to use. The idea grew and eventually I refined it, hired someone to help me, and we came up with a device that reclaimed heat and used it for different applications; you could heat the factory or offices with energy that otherwise would be wasted.

  For complicated reasons, we weren’t able to patent the device, but we were quite successful with it. We shipped units all across the country, and even the world.

  My brother, in the meantime, decided he couldn’t stand the cold—not that I blame him. He moved out to California, started his own business there, and was quite successful. And warm.

  Love, Sorrow, and Fame of a Sort

  In the winter of 1981, Estelle had not been feeling well and eventually made an appointment to see a doctor. I waited with my daughter while Estelle went into the examining room. It took an awfully long time—you know how doctors can be.

  Finally the door opened and the doctor came out.

  “Your wife has lung cancer,” he told us. “We’re going to try to operate.”

  Estelle was her usual cheerful self when she came out a short time later. She went to the hospital and they removed a lung. The next day the doctor told me that the cancer had spread.

  They tried chemo. She lost her hair and suffered greatly. She would stay in the hospital overnight, coming home the next day drained.

  Treatments in a Boston hospital didn’t help; it seemed as if they did more damage than the cancer.

  Almost a year to the day after she was diagnosed, Estelle fell into a coma in the hospital where she was being treated. It was near our fortieth wedding anniversary.

  On the day of our anniversary, my son and daughter came with me and a pair of friends to the hospital. We had a small bottle of wine, a cake, and roses.

  Estelle was unconscious the whole time, and died two days later.

  She was a beautiful, loving woman. Her only flaw: she smoked cigarettes, and it killed her.

  * * *

  I filled my time with work, the Lions Club, a few other business and community things. But there is a hole in a man’s soul if not his heart when he doesn’t have a true companion.

  It was my daughter Linda who knew that I was drifting.

  “Mom would not want you to be alone,” she said. “She’d want you to be happy. Start dating.”

  She played matchmaker, recommending I ask out a lovely lady who worked in the office of one of my companies.

  I couldn’t do that, I told her. She worked for me.

  Eventually, my daughter persuaded me.

  Looking back now, I suppose I was very awkward about it, or careful, or both.

  Being with her, though, was very easy. And in May 1983, I married Barbara Mahan.

  I’m not exaggerating when I say her love has kept me alive.

  * * *

  Time passes without us having much say in it, doesn’t it? And with that come passages.

  My brother Bill passed away in 2010. We spoke for a long time the day before he died. He’d lived a good life, he told me; he was ready to move on to eternity. Thinking back on it, it was a sad conversation, and yet what he said was so characteristic of him that I can only admire his presence of mind at the time. He was both philosophical and practical throughout his life; he was clear-eyed to the end.

  I’d retired by then, having sold my businesses when I turned sixty-five. A few years later, Barbara and I moved to North Carolina to enjoy our retirement.

  People think that life slows down once you retire; you can’t prove it by me. I seem to have more commitments these days than I did running two firms.

  Not that I’m complaining.

  I’ve had a few hobbies over the years. Restoring old Mercedes—I loved the 280 SLs especially—was a lot of fun. One of the most rewa
rding things I’ve done in my golden years was connecting with veterans of the 16th Regiment and the 1st Division. I have been honored as a distinguished member of the regiment’s association, as well as a member of the Society of the First Infantry Division. I’ve even been made an honorary tank commander—quite a privilege for a medic.

  The reunions and staff rides across Europe are a lot of fun. I’ve had the privilege of visiting the Normandy battlefields several times. In 2018, the village of Colleville-sur-Mer, where I landed on D-Day, dedicated a monument to the medics and myself at what is now known as “Ray’s Rock.” It was an honor and a privilege to be at that ceremony. I was very fortunate that a number of my friends and family could attend as well. The French have always been tremendously gracious to me and other veterans, always expressing their gratitude for our role in liberating their country.

  Having survived the war and lived so long, I’ve become a point of contact with the past. Generals and others have sought me out, not just to thank me for my service, but through me to thank all who served and sacrificed in that war. I think I’ve met every 1st Division commander since 1940 and gotten to know most of them well. Same for the Army chief of staff and any number of other high-ranking officers. I’ve even met the queen of England, a rare treat for a kid from Alabama.

  While there have been a number of news stories and such about me or quoting me on D-Day and the war, I’m always a little surprised that people know my name or recognize my face. Odd things happen—I turn up on the internet; a hotel where I’m staying finds out and puts my name on its sign to welcome me.

  It’s always a little touching, not to mention a surprise. I try not to let it go to my head, knowing it’s really my companions and generation that are being recognized.

  Unfortunately, there are many fewer of us these days. I know only a handful of other men still alive who were on the beaches on June 6. Soon there won’t be any.

  I worry that the connection to the past, to the values that put us on that beach and saw us through that terrible day—values that took us from Africa to Italy to France and beyond—will weaken and die when we are gone.