Tom Brokaw

by The Greatest Generation

  Tom Broderick spent seventeen weeks in basic training for the infantry in Mineral Wells, Texas, before heading to Fort Benning, Georgia, to become a member of the 82nd Airborne. When he finished his training, a captain offered him an instructor’s job and the rank of sergeant. Again Broderick refused the safer alternative, saying he wanted to stay with his outfit and go overseas.

  Broderick’s unit shipped out to England as replacements for the 82nd Airborne men lost in the Normandy invasion. In September, Broderick made his first jump into combat, in Holland. He was in the thick of it immediately, the Battle of Arnhem. It was a joint mission of American and British paratroopers, and their objective was to take the Nijmegen bridge to help pave the Allies’ way into Germany and to discourage any German counterattack. “We jumped at about five hundred feet because we wanted to be a low target. It was one-thirty in the afternoon.

  “The first German I saw I couldn’t shoot, because he was riding a bicycle away from me. I couldn’t shoot at him because he wasn’t shooting at me. Things were different ten minutes later. There were Germans all over the place—they outnumbered us about forty thousand to twenty-eight thousand. It was combat morning, noon, and night.”

  On the fifth day Broderick made a mistake that would alter his life forever. “I remember being in the foxhole and . . . I was lining up my aim on a German. I got a little high in the foxhole and I got shot clean through the head—through the left temple.”

  A Catholic chaplain arrived to administer the last rites, but after slipping into unconsciousness, Broderick somehow managed to stay alive until he awoke a few days later in a British hospital. He was relieved to be out of combat but he had a problem: he couldn’t see. Why not? he asked. His doctors told him, “When that hemorrhage clears up, you’ll be all right.” Broderick continued to believe them until he was sent to Dibble General Hospital in Menlo Park, California, one of the two facilities in the nation treating blind veterans.

  Finally a doctor told him the truth. He would be blind forever. “I was stunned. I cried, ‘Aren’t you going to do anything?’ ” He rushed to a fellow veteran who had been hospitalized with him in England, a man recovering from shrapnel in one of his eyes. “I just cried and cried, and he said to me, ‘We knew the whole time, Tom; we just didn’t want to tell you.’ ”

  Broderick was angry and disoriented. When the Army made him take a rehabilitation course in Connecticut, he said, “I rebelled—I just didn’t want to learn braille. I told them I was going to work in my dad’s trucking business just so I could get out of there.”

  It didn’t get much better when he returned to Chicago. He enrolled at Loyola University and the Veterans Administration hired a reader for him, but after only seven weeks Broderick dropped out and went to work for his father. His downslide continued. “They didn’t know what to do with me. Dad had me taking orders on the phone because I could still write. But then I heard of people having to call back to get the orders straightened out. I thought, ‘Hell, I’m screwing up.’ ” He quit after a month.

  Broderick realized he’d have to learn braille. His Veterans Administration counselor also recommended he enroll in a class in insurance sales, a fast-growing field in postwar America. He learned the insurance business by day and braille by night. Before long the VA found him a job with an elderly insurance broker in his neighborhood. Not too long after that, Broderick had established his own insurance business. He was no longer the young man angry at his fate. He was now prepared to accept his blindness and get on with his life.

  Broderick worked six days a week. When he wasn’t taking orders by phone with his braille machine and dictating them to his secretary later, he was making house calls at night. He quickly developed a very keen audio sense; many customers he dealt with on the phone were astonished when they finally met him. He’d quickly call out their name when he heard their voice. Until that point they had no idea he was blind.

  Later, when he and his wife were having children—seven in all—Broderick would tell each of them the same story as they reached the age when they could understand the real meaning of blindness. His daughter, Katy Broderick Duffy: “He’d tell us how he was hurt in the war and that when he came home he went with his mother to Lourdes, the famous shrine in France, to pray for a miracle. He said that before they put the water on his eyes, he asked the Lord for a favor: ‘If I can’t have my eyesight back, could you find a girl for me to marry?’ And that’s how he met my mother. When you’re little and you hear that story, you really think it was a miracle.”

  Broderick’s wife, Eileen, is a little skeptical of the story, but Tom insists it’s true, although his version is a bit breezier. “I said, ‘I know we don’t always get what we want, but what’s right for us. I’m really hoping to meet the woman for me—and if you want to throw in the eyes, too, that’s okay.’ ”

  Tom Broderick, feature in the Chicago Tribune, 1944

  Not long after that, Tom and Eileen met on a blind date, no irony intended. Eileen was a twenty-three-year-old nurse and Tom was twenty-seven. She fell in love instantly. “That night, after the date, I went home, woke my cousin up, and said, ‘I’ve met the man I’m going to marry.’ She told me I’d been drinking too much and I should go to bed, but I knew.

  “You didn’t think about his blindness. It just didn’t seem to matter. He was so unique. He ran a business by himself and didn’t need help from anyone, although it was a little tricky when we went out alone. I’d have to take him to the men’s room and ask someone to take him in. I’d stand outside. I think, being a nurse, I was a little more flexible. I understood that it was all just mechanics.

  “My father was worried when I said I was marrying Tom. He just didn’t understand how Tom could take care of me and a family. But after three or four years of marriage they became very close. Tom’s mother started him off right. When he came back from the war she would not allow anyone to use the word blind in the house. Tom had to be treated with dignity and respect, and anything he wanted to try, he could do it. When he left his father’s business to set out on his own, she was happy.”

  Tom and Eileen had common roots as strongly faithful Roman Catholic Irish Americans. They settled into a life of the prosperous middle class on the south side of Chicago, where Tom’s business continued to flourish and their family grew quickly. During one five-year stretch Eileen had five children, and then another two later. Eileen says, “He was very involved in their upbringing. There were things he could do and those he couldn’t. It was kind of trial and error. He couldn’t change diapers but he could give them a bottle. We never talked about how to make things work. It wasn’t easy, but we did what we had to do.”

  The Broderick children were part of the equation of making things work. Daughter Katy says, “The blindness was just incidental. I’d see other people who were blind and not well adjusted and think, ‘What’s wrong with them?’ Later I realized not everyone had the strength and determination of my father. When I was little, my friends would say, ‘Your father’s not blind!’ He could just do so many things it didn’t seem like he was blind.”

  Dan Broderick, one of Tom’s sons, says his father worked out a system to take care of most of the household chores, including assembling an elaborate stereo system, washing and waxing the car, and changing the storm windows. He refused to succumb to his blindness. He even refused to let Eileen get disability license plates for the family car when they became available. “What’s a handicap?” he’d say. “I don’t have a handicap.”

  But then Tom isn’t much for cars. Since he can’t drive himself, he likes to walk, and his family was expected to do the same. Katy remembers, “We walked everywhere. He hated getting rides. He thought it was a waste.”

  During his introduction to the world of the blind at the rehabilitation center in Connecticut, Broderick and his friends formed an informal organization to help each other adjust to their new realities. It became the Blinded Veterans Association, and Broderick decided that he shoul
d share the lessons of his new life with other veterans who were struggling with their blindness. He began making trips to Chicago-area rehabilitation programs, counseling sightless veterans on the career possibilities in insurance, mortgage sales, and car financing—the hot financial service fields as America exploded out of the cities and into the suburbs.

  “I’d tell them about my own struggle—how I was young when I became blind and I knew how they felt. I brought some of them down to my office so they could see the braille machine and what was possible. I don’t feel any special bond with other blind organizations or blind people, but I wanted to help veterans. You have to do it. It was no big deal, really.”

  Tom’s son Dan remembers that, during Vietnam, the nearby Veterans Administration office would send over young men who’d lost their sight in that war. “When you first saw them you thought you were at a wake—some of them were suicidal, with their eyes blown out. Mom would go out and get a case of beer, and they’d sit on the porch with my dad and listen to the White Sox game. Then he’d navigate ’em around our house to show them what we had—five bedrooms, a big house. By the end of the night they’d be back on the porch, drinking beer but laughing now.”

  Another son, Scott: “You know how everyone says their dad is the best. Well, do you know how many people I’ve heard that from about my dad? Friends, neighbors, clients. Every kid thinks it, but to hear it from other people is so gratifying. He never let his disability get in the way of anything.”

  Tom Broderick in so many ways embodies the best qualities of his generation. He was so eager to get involved in the war he enlisted in two branches of the service. He was gravely wounded, but once he got over the initial understandable anger, he set out to be the best husband, father, businessman, and citizen he could be—sight or no sight. He didn’t grow bitter and dependent on others. He didn’t blame the world for his condition.

  A common lament of the World War II generation is the absence today of personal responsibility. Broderick remembers listening to an NPR broadcast and hearing an account of how two boys found a loaded gun in one of their homes. The visiting boy accidentally shot his friend. The victim’s father was on the radio, talking about suing the gun manufacturer. That got to Tom Broderick. “So,” he said, “here’s this man talking about suing and he’s not accepting responsibility for having a loaded gun in the house.”

  Tom knows something about personal responsibility. He’s been forced to live as a blind man for more than fifty years, and when asked about the moment when the lights were literally shot out of his eyes, he says only, “It was my fault for getting too high in the foxhole. That happens sometimes.”

  CHARLES O. VAN GORDER, MD

  “If I had my life to do all over again, I’d do it the same way—go somewhere small where people have a need.”

  IT IS NOT SURPRISING, I suppose, that the horrors of war give birth to a new generation of good Samaritans. Young men and women who have been so intensely exposed to such inhumanity often make a silent pledge that if they ever escape this dark world of death and injuries, this universe of cruelty, they will devote their lives to good works. Sometimes the pledge is a conscious thought. Sometimes it is a subconscious reaction to their experiences. This is the story of a good Samaritan who set out in life to heal, found his greatest personal and professional tests under fire, and returned home to his original calling with a renewed sense of mission.

  There had never been a military operation remotely approaching the scale and the complexity of D-Day. It involved 176,000 troops, more than 12,000 airplanes, almost 10,000 ships, boats, landing craft, frigates, sloops, and other special combat vessels—all involved in a surprise attack on the heavily fortified north coast of France, to secure a beachhead in the heart of enemy-held territory so that the march to Germany and victory could begin. It was daring, risky, confusing, bloody, and ultimately glorious.

  It will live forever as a stroke of enduring genius, a military maneuver that, even though it went awry and spilled ashore in chaos, succeeded. It was so risky that before he launched the invasion, gambling that the small break in the weather would hold, General Dwight Eisenhower personally wrote out a statement taking full responsibility for the failure if it occurred. He was grateful he never had to release it.

  Dr. Charles Van Gorder, wartime portrait

  A new generation of Americans has a greater appreciation of what was involved on D-Day as a result of Steven Spielberg’s stunning film Saving Private Ryan. For most younger Americans, D-Day has been a page or two in their history books, or some anniversary ceremony on television with a lot of white-haired men leaning into the winds coming off the English Channel as President Reagan or President Clinton praised their contributions. Saving Private Ryan, although a work of fiction, is true to the sound, the fury, the death, the terrible wounds of that day.

  Charles O. Van Gorder was a special part of D-Day. He was a thirty-one-year-old captain in the U.S. Army Medical Corps in June 1944, a graduate of the University of Tennessee Medical School. He’d already served in North Africa when he volunteered to be part of a two-team surgical unit that would try something new for D-Day: it would be part of the 101st Airborne assault force, setting up medical facilities in the middle of the fighting instead of safely behind the Allied lines. They knew that casualties would be high and that saving lives would require immediate attention.

  So Captain Van Gorder and his colleagues were loaded onto gliders for the flight across the English Channel and into Normandy. These were primitive aircraft, made of tubing, canvas, and plywood, with no engines, of course. They were silent—the element of surprise—and they could land in rough terrain.

  Van Gorder remembers, “We landed in the field where we were supposed to, but they forgot one thing: when they put the brakes on, it made that glider just like an ice sled and it went zooming across the field. We hit a tree—which ended up right between the pilot and the copilot. Nobody in my glider was killed, but nearly all the other gliders had someone killed or injured.”

  That was at four A.M. By nine that same day, June 6, 1944, Van Gorder and his fellow doctors had set up an operating facility, a precursor to the MASH units, the Mobile Army Surgical Hospitals that saved so many lives and, later on television, gave us so much intelligent entertainment.

  They were located in a French château; they converted the milk storage room to an operating room, and by late that afternoon the château grounds were covered with hundreds of wounded young Americans. Van Gorder and the other surgeons operated around the clock for thirty-six hours, always wearing their helmets because the château was often in the line of fire. The Army had issued the medical team several cases of Scotch whiskey and Van Gorder later remembered, “The only thing that kept us going was sipping that Scotch. Finally, I got so tired my head fell down into an open abdomen.” He was ordered to go back to his tent for some rest. En route, a soldier offered him hot chocolate. When he decided to go back for the hot chocolate, a German bomb hit his tent, demolishing it. It was the first of many narrow escapes for Dr. Van, as he was called.

  Altogether, it was a frantic and grisly scene that even now, more than fifty years later, Dr. Van Gorder cannot remove from his memory. “I have flashbacks every day,” he says. “All those boys being slaughtered, sometimes two hundred boys and only ten surgeons. The war made me a better doctor because I had to do all kinds of surgery. There were no trauma surgery books before the war to learn from.”

  Van Gorder’s D-Day initiation wasn’t the end of his frontline experience; it was only the beginning. His unit stayed with the 101st over the next six months as it fought its way across Europe, headed for the heart of Germany. They were in the thick of the fighting during the long siege in Belgium, and during the Battle of the Bulge.

  In December 1944, Dr. Van Gorder and his colleague and friend, Dr. John Rodda, were in the middle of surgery when their makeshift operating room came under heavy fire from German forces. “I was practically lying on my stomach
operating on patients,” Van Gorder remembers, “because of the shooting coming right into the tent.

  “I was the only one who spoke German, so I went to the end of the tent and waved a towel through the flap. I told the German commander we had more than fifty wounded, including German POWs. He told me to load them up. I had to leave one patient behind with his stomach open.” They were taken prisoner on December 19, 1944, Dr. Van Gorder’s thirty-second birthday.

  Dr. Charles Van Gorder in the Rodda–Van

  Gorder Hospital and Clinic, Andrews, North Carolina

  (left to right): Dr. Charles Van Gorder, Dr. John S. Rodda, nurse

  “Captain Charles Van Gorder demonstrates

  what the well-dressed airborne surgeon wears on an

  invasion,” June 13, 1944

  Charles Van Gorder, MD, 1994

  Van Gorder had suffered shrapnel wounds in his knees while the operating tent was under fire, so his friend Dr. Rodda supported him as they trekked through the snow under the watchful German guns. Van Gorder is convinced that without Rodda’s help the Germans would have shot him as a straggler.

  He returned the favor when Rodda became ill. Two young American doctors, who had seen more death and suffering than most graduating classes of doctors were likely to see in a lifetime, were now trying just to keep each other alive. Nothing in medical school had prepared them for this primal struggle of being prisoners of war in a bleak winter landscape in the heart of enemy territory. Back home, their families had no idea of what they were going through, and it was just as well.

  Van Gorder, Rodda, and the other prisoners were packed into boxcars, and the train moved them to the north of Germany, where they stayed on a siding for three days, locked inside. “Half of us would stand and half of us would sit in rotation because it was so crowded,” Van Gorder remembers.