A Lucky Life Interrupted

by Tom Brokaw

  —

  Bill’s passing and my cancer were another intersection in our lives in which it worked out better for me. As we prepared to lose him I had an appointment to assess the results of the more aggressive treatment. It was the most important evaluation since the diagnosis and I was low-grade anxious. I like to have an idea of the outcome, whatever the experience. Besides, I was increasingly aware of the good days I was giving up. At my age they’re not easily recaptured.

  “Tom Brokaw, two six four oh.”

  Meredith and I arrived early at Dr. Landau’s examination room, riffling through the email and personal projects on our iPads. Heather walked in with her typically pleasant but low-key greeting, leaned up against the examination table, and said, “Well, it’s good news. The tumor in the soft tissue around the pelvis has disappeared.” (Did I know there had been a tumor in the soft tissue? I was so concentrated on blood and bones, I don’t think so.) Going on, she read from her notes, “The bones are healing and getting stronger. The blood count has improved significantly. It is very close to where we want it.”

  Silently, I thought, Yes! Maybe there is an endgame to all of this after all.

  The chemotherapy would continue through the summer and she wanted to add gamma globulin therapy as a defense against those recurring bronchial conditions.

  By fall, she said, there was a good chance I could move to a drug maintenance program, which is what gives MM patients most of their life back.

  Thank you, Revlimid, Velcade, and dexamethasone, my old friends, I look forward to seeing you again.

  Dr. Anderson at Dana-Farber and Dr. Gertz at Mayo were equally pleased. Whatever differences they had in treatment, the results were impressive. At breakfast with Dr. Gertz he used the encomium “spectacular” as he left the table.

  After sharing the good news with family and friends I typically overreached with spring and summer plans. The new U.S. ambassador to Italy, John Phillips, and his wife, former CBS correspondent Linda Douglass, invited me the first weekend in June to discuss the Italian campaign during World War II and the fall of Rome, which came one day before D-Day in Normandy and thus was largely lost to history.

  Why not? Bronchitis again, that’s why not. It would not clear in time for Rome and there was some question whether I could get to Normandy for the seventieth anniversary of D-Day. NBC News had made extensive plans.

  After a militarylike assault on the bronchitis I was cleared for the flight to England. Meredith and I joined a fund-raising cruise organized by the National World War II Museum in New Orleans, the impressive and still-expanding tribute to that seminal event in American life.

  When the late historian Stephen Ambrose first envisioned and then began construction on the museum, it was to commemorate D-Day and the landing craft that had made the invasion possible. They were Higgins boats, designed and built by Andrew Higgins in New Orleans.

  Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks of Saving Private Ryan and I helped launch the museum with donations and personal appearances. We continued after Ambrose’s death when his fellow historian Gordon H. “Nick” Mueller took over and agreed to expand the mission to a museum of the whole war, not just the invasion. It has become a national treasure, with several wings containing tanks, fighter planes, bombers, virtual reality submarine missions, oral histories, and an IMAX film produced by Hanks that leaves viewers breathless.

  For the cruise Mueller booked several prominent World War II historians, including Rick Atkinson, who lectured nightly and provided commentary during tours of the key D-Day sites. As the amateur in the class I concentrated on the personal stories of ordinary men without whom the invasion would have failed.

  I reminded the guests that the invasion had succeeded not just because of the brave infantrymen who waded ashore, and the paratroopers who jumped behind enemy lines, but also because of the medics who were constantly exposed to enemy fire as they desperately tried to save the lives of gravely wounded soldiers crying out for help or, as everyone there that day remembers, crying out for their mothers. And then there were the graves registration teams that came ashore to collect dog tags from the mortally wounded so they could be identified. The young men wrestling trucks and half-tracks onto the beach to keep the supply lines open.

  I told them about Frank DeVita, with whom I had spent the day on Omaha Beach with thirty members of his family. Frank had dropped out of high school to enlist in the Coast Guard when war broke out, and on June 6, 1944, he was an eighteen-year-old gunner’s mate on the USS Samuel Chase. He was ordered to leave his gun position and man the forward ramp on a landing craft headed onto Omaha under heavy enemy fire.

  Seventy years later Frank remembered:

  When we got near the beach one particular machine gun took a liking to us and was hitting my boat, [making a sound] like a typewriter.

  The Germans had the high ground and were shooting down at us. It was like hitting fish in a barrel.

  My job was to drop the ramp and I knew in my head—even though I was a young kid—when I drop the ramp, instead of the bullets hitting the ramp they would come into the boat. So the coxswain says, “Drop the ramp,” and I made believe I didn’t hear him.

  So he said it a second time and again I made believe I didn’t hear him. Third time he says, “Goddammit, DeVita, drop the effing ramp.”

  So we had thirty men on the boat. Three men made it to the beach. They were all wounded and some of them were dead.

  DeVita can still hear their cries. “You know, there’s a fallacy, people think that when a man is dying….They don’t ask for God. The last word that they say before they die is ‘Mama, mama.’ ”

  As Frank and I stood on Omaha seventy years later he was surrounded by his family, his wife, children, and grandchildren. As he remembered that day and the life he was able to have, denied to those who fell when the ramp went down, we both choked up and he said, “These kids were eighteen, nineteen years old. They’re never gonna see their sons play Little League baseball. They’re never gonna walk their daughter down the aisle. And they’re never gonna hold their grandchild in their arms.”

  After an emotional farewell to the DeVita family I made my way awkwardly across the sands of Omaha Beach and around the pools of rainwater, still favoring my painful back and weakened legs but thinking, “This will end. We’ve got cancer on the run. I get to hold my grandchildren.”

  By the end of that week, I had spent time with a member of the 82nd Airborne who jumped into Normandy, a pilot who flew paratroopers across the channel, and a Rhode Island veteran on his first trip back after a horrendous landing seventy years earlier. He was a member of a navy explosive assault team and the first off their rubber raft as it hit the beach. A moment later the raft took a direct hit and all his teammates were killed. He was left to wonder, as so many D-Day survivors do, “Why was I spared?”

  Deborah Turness suggested I find the words and images to sum up the week. This is what I wrote and Brian Williams and the NBC Nightly News team broadcast:

  (sound of muted taps in the background)

  (scenes of headstones—individual and row upon row)

  “This is why we’re here,” I said softly. “Here above the beaches of Normandy,”

  (sound of surf)

  “just beyond the water”

  (incoming surf)

  “that brought liberty—at a great sacrifice.”

  (faces of D-Day vets)

  “For those who survived that day and so many others this is a journey of honor and remembrance.

  “To honor their fallen friends and remember, seventy years later.”

  (ceremony)

  “But it is not just the veterans who honor the sacrifices here.”

  (Obama and company)

  “A new generation of leaders takes up the call.”

  OBAMA: We tell the story for the old soldiers who pull themselves a little straighter today to salute brothers who never made it home. We tell the story for the daughter who clutches a fa
ded photo of her father, forever young….

  Gentlemen, I want each of you to know that your legacy is in good hands.

  “And the President reminded us that their legacy goes beyond the fighting to the costly time to their young lives.”

  OBAMA: They left home barely more than boys and returned home heroes. But to their great credit, that is not how this generation carried itself. After the war some put away their medals, were quiet about their service, moved on.

  (Brokaw voice-over)

  “But before they could go home there was Normandy.

  “There had never been anything like it before and there would never be again.

  “Now in their late eighties and nineties, so many of these veterans will not be around for the seventy-fifth anniversary.”

  (vet in wheelchair)

  “Their lives are coming to a close.”

  (bring in taps)

  “But their legacy can never be dimmed.”

  That essay—words, images, and sounds—was the opening of NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams that night and it was for me a distillation of all my experiences on these sacred sands and beachheads. Normandy is now a part of my life in a way I could never have known it would become when I first arrived more than thirty years ago.

  I’ve heard the American presidents speak—Reagan, Clinton, Bush 43, Obama—and watched the families embrace the survivors, I’ve told the stories of heroism and loss, witnessed the twenty-one-gun salutes and the playing of the anthems. In the final hours of each of these anniversaries I am reminded again that these tributes, however grand, are inadequate to commemorate what happened here. As long as there is recorded history D-Day will be remembered as a monumental triumph of freedom over oppression won by military audacity carried ashore by men and boys who died, lost their limbs, survived, and gave us all an enduring lesson in the virtues of humble valor.

  I was exhausted by the end of the week but I would not have been anywhere else.

  Summer

  Returning to New York I began to plot the summer.

  Could it have been just a year ago that the onset of back pain was aggravating, a nuisance I thought would quickly clear up once I got the right exercises? Once the cancer diagnosis was established, Meredith and the physicians counseled patience, saying, “Next year at this time you’ll be much better.”

  It is now close to “next year at this time” and I am better but I am not yet sturdy enough to wade rivers running even moderately high and fast. The daily dose of high-powered drugs drains energy, and as I compensate for aches on one side of my back, new ones appear on the other. Will I have a trouble-free, back-to-normal day anytime soon, or is this the new life of a man who is old in body and spirit?

  Those spirits were lifted by a unique summer reunion on a series of bluffs along the south-central South Dakota stretch of the Missouri River, home of the stately Fort Randall Dam, a massive public works project initiated immediately after World War II.

  When my family arrived in the area in 1947 it was a nineteenth-century tableau of an abandoned cavalry fort, a few Yankton Sioux Indian homes along the river bottom, and a few small towns nearby to serve the farming community.

  The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers were in charge of building a new town to house the thousands of workers needed to complete the ten-year project, the largest earth-rolled dam of its kind in the United States.

  Within two years the corps had constructed a modern town with graceful boulevards, shopping center, state-of-the-art high school, hospital, movie theater, hotel, recreation center, and a mix of triplexes, duplexes, single-family homes, and trailer lots for more than three thousand residents who came as welders, electricians, truck drivers, operators of enormous excavation machinery, ironworkers, carpenters, engineers, and surveyors.

  They were from the Midwest, the Deep South, the Southwest, and California, refugees from the Great Depression and veterans of World War II. This was their first real opportunity to make a good wage, buy a car, think about sending a son or daughter to college.

  The Brokaws moved into a three-bedroom duplex with hardwood floors and an up-to-date kitchen, easily the best housing my parents had ever occupied. Dad bought his first new car and Mother got a deep freeze.

  The southerners brought hush puppies and soft drawls, Okies had two names—Bobby Gene—and the midwestern crowd taught all how to hunt pheasants and fish the Missouri. It was a working-class nirvana and ten years later it was over. The dam was completed, the town folded up, and we all moved on, with lingering memories of the good times.

  A few years ago some of the high school graduates who went on to become engineers, orthopedists, physicians, developers, businessmen, decided a small museum was in order to remind everyone what had gone on there.

  I produced a ten-minute minidocumentary and the organizing committee did an impressive job of displaying photos, artifacts, construction plans, and local Indian lore. Five hundred people showed up, including some of my most cherished boyhood friends. One, my regular camping tent mate, still had his irreverent sense of humor, confiding he tells his Minnesota small-town friends when they ask if he knew me, “Know him? Hell, I slept with him.”

  The weekend was a snapshot of a time gone by, the can-do years right after the war when national pride and optimism were the twin drivers of the American Dream.

  Families arrived in aged cars, some from homes with no indoor plumbing, to find their first steady job at a good wage. They left in new vehicles, money in the bank and kids ready for college.

  The reunion weekend received heavy local press coverage. My old friends, most of whom I had not seen in more than half a century, were relieved that I was on the mend. One, from a large Irish American family, was a classmate who lost his mother to cancer. I remember her ghostly appearance when I’d visit their home, which had a funereal air as she made her way slowly from room to room. It was a haunting experience and when I recalled it, Jerry paused and said, “I was just nine.”

  Those were the days when the word “cancer” was rarely uttered in public, as if the sound alone was some kind of a curse. Now at large benefit dinners to fund cancer research survivors are asked to stand, magazines feature the latest treatments and offer suggestions on how to cope, obituaries have adopted the phrase “courageous battle” to describe cancer victims’ final days.

  —

  Before returning to Montana I made a pilgrimage to Cooperstown, New York, for a baseball fan’s religious ceremony: the induction of a new class of major league legends.

  It was a legendary class. Pitchers Tom Glavine and Greg Maddux of the Atlanta Braves; power hitter Frank Thomas of the Chicago White Sox; managers Joe Torre of the Yankees, Tony La Russa of the Cardinals, and Bobby Cox of the Braves.

  In an era of mega-events, Hall of Fame weekend is a restoration of a time gone by in small-town America, with sports heroes and their families thrilled to be selected, sharing bus rides and golf games, parades down Cooperstown’s Main Street, and after-dinner drinks in the bars of the Otesaga Hotel, a grand old resort on Lake Otsego.

  My ticket to the weekend was a foreword I wrote for the hall’s seventy-fifth anniversary memorial book, a handsomely designed publication featuring photographs and baseball descriptions of every player in the shrine.

  Fred Wilpon, the owner of the New York Mets, and his wife, Judith, gave me a ride to Cooperstown on their plane and made sure I was on the inside of the weekend’s rituals. That included dinner with Fred’s friend since their days as teenage teammates, the incomparable Sandy Koufax. Sandy was in the last year of his Hall of Fame career with the Los Angeles Dodgers when I moved to Southern California, and often when he pitched I tried to be in the press box so I could have a straight look at his overpowering fastball and breaking pitches. Not for the first time, I had a full appreciation of those who say the most difficult task in sports is hitting a ball thrown at eighty to ninety miles an hour from sixty feet away—a ball breaking down or away at the plate, and your
only weapon is a thirty-six-ounce tubular piece of ash.

  Now seventy-eight, Koufax remains a handsome, trim man, still carrying himself with an easy reserve in his tailored blazer and tie—always a tie throughout the weekend. We’d met a couple of times before and I was flattered he remembered me from my Los Angeles days, partly because, he said, laughing, “Your tie knot was always crooked.”

  Damn! He was right. In my first year on the air I tied an ugly knot, never knowing that Sandy Koufax was looking on. I corrected it later but having Koufax remember it almost fifty years later gives it a certain panache.

  Having dinner with Koufax, high-fiving Johnny Bench and Reggie Jackson, both of whom I’ve known for a while, trading Omaha stories with Bob Gibson, laughing—again—at Tommy Lasorda stories, a morning chat with Cal Ripken on the picturesque hotel veranda, congratulating Glavine and La Russa in the hotel lobby, hanging out with Billy Crystal, a guest of Joe Torre’s, catching up with Hank Aaron, with whom I did a documentary about his successful quest to break Babe Ruth’s home run record—well, it was good to be excused from cancer for a while.

  Reality returned Sunday afternoon during the outdoor ceremonies. The afternoon began with a familiar sound carrying across the expansive grass amphitheater, as jumbo screens carried the poetic MLB Network opening for the induction. Bob Costas had suggested me as the narrator and I was happy to be somehow involved, if only as a voice.

  The Wilpons secured third-row seats for the ceremony, which had all the appearance of a reunion of a college championship team until you looked more closely. There’s George Brett, Mike Schmidt, Brooks Robinson, Phil Niekro, Barry Larkin, Frank Robinson, Carlton “Pudge” Fisk, Juan Marichal, Gaylord Perry, Tom Seaver, Nolan Ryan—a stage full of certified baseball immortals.