Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas.

It’s a holiday season and, though our family rejected religion and God
three generations ago, we are still of Christian stock. The holiday is
observed, a tree goes up, gifts are exchanged. The eggnog rolls out
and, just as Christ did, my uncle giggles maniacally as he spikes it
with rum and brandy and scotch. Personally, I think that’s a little
over the top and just this side of nauseating. You don’t quite notice
it after the fourth one, though. In fact, you can stick needles through
the webs of your fingers after the fourth one.

So that’s Christmas and, barring the alcohol, I haven’t quite
gotten to the cheer part. Let’s go to the kitchen table, beneath the
glaring lights of the fluorescents, and dinner has run the courses. We
all sit in varying stages of alcoholic glee when my grandmother sighs
heavily and the Christmas cheer begins.

“The relief of Bastogne. Christmas Eve, 1944.” She pauses and the
lights seem to dim around us. Someone’s gonna die, baby, and you know
it ain’t good. My grandfather goes silent. The mere mention of those
years tends to roll the nightmares back into his bed and bring a
tremolo to his voice. His dreams are filled with Japanese torpedoes,
and friends lying dead on those silly islands. Something in Europe,
though, is a rare story, and the first my grandmother has spoken of
them.

“It was in a place called Eschdorf, I think. Don’t even know where it is.”

“What is this?” That’s my uncle. Quick to draw the old folks back from the edge.

“Oscar Lewis. In Eschdorf, Christmas Eve, killed by the Germans.” She
looked over her glasses. “My first love. They sent all my letters back
to me.” She touched her glass, eyes watering, “Merry Christmas, Oscar.”

He came out of Cairo, West Virginia. You pronounce that ‘Karo’, like
the syrup. Cairo had given many of her boys to the Confederates. The
wounds and the pain of that great war that changed America were still
whispered when my grandmother’s letters went out to doomed Oscar Lewis,
fighting a war that would change us once again. He had two brothers –
George and Marshall. George was retarded, so severely he lived in the
shadows of the Lewis homestead. Marshall, also at the push to relieve
Bastogne during Hitler’s last offensive, was captured. He spent the
remainder of the war in a prison camp and, when he returned in the
autumn of 1945, he was barely a man. He would die young, his time in
the camps never put into words, but they lived forever in his night
terrors.

What were Oscar’s thoughts on this night, so long ago? I sit and I
drink and I think of writing an article, but all the humors flow out of
me. There, in Eschdorf, the entrenched Germans met the hopeful
liberators of Bastogne. It was this town that had been under siege
since the Battle of the Bulge began and we were just a hair away from
failure. As the relief marched desperately, they met powerful
resistance and ended up getting pinned down in the surrounding
villages. In Eschdorf, the Germans were ready. Our troops collided with
them in the dark, frozen night of Christmas Eve and fell into a chaotic
battle where every man fought for himself. Americans and Germans
scattered, fighting on the streets and in the houses, dodging each
other through the ruins and the shadows. The barns, the basements.
German tanks held the town square and fired blindly into the village,
killing their own and ours. Those who survived have all said that they
never killed a German who was further away than the reach of their arm.
Most would literally bump into their target and, friend or foe, shoot
or stab their way to the next pocket of shadows, the next wall of
safety. Throughout Christmas Eve, we slaughtered our own, as well as
the Germans. They, in turn, were no better off.

Somewhere in that fray, in those shadows, Oscar Lewis bumped up against
friend or foe and, in the darkness and the terror of war, his life
ended.

The fight for Eschdorf, some stupid little town that I don’t even see
on the map, lasted for two days. With the dawn of Christmas morning,
and after a night of constant, blind battle, the best we could do was
lay low. If you moved, the snipers had you. The tanks had you. Towards
nightfall, reinforcements arrived and we renewed our offensive. The
Germans fell back, fighting for every inch, and were slowly flanked on
their eastern side. But, still, they lasted. Another night fell and our
reinforcements were scattered throughout the village, the line broken.
It took until the evening of the 26th before Eschdorf fell.

The Germans we were fighting were the same divisions that had marched
on Paris, and then the Ukraine. They had taken the Caucasus Mountains
in 1942. They had escaped Stalingrad. The Ardennes Offensive broke
them. Divisions shattered. It was a last ditch effort for the Third
Reich, only a little over five months away from surrender.

In all of that stood a boy from Cairo. My grandmother’s letters, of
course, sit somewhere down there in the crawlspace beneath our house.
You can almost feel them, if you sit here where I am. A stack of
unopened, returned letters packed away down there with this family’s
memories.

It seems we never moved forward. That’s the curse of the World War II
generation. To sit there and spin away in the wind. Their eyes saw
things that we can’t imagine. They carry names and faces in their
hearts that were ripped apart by people you and I only see as silly
tourists.

And where did we go from there? To my uncle’s shaking hands in the
smoke-shrouded jungles of Vietnam? To our own world today where we
continue, non stop, on a path of righteous murder?

It’s Christmas in America. We, you and I, are so blind, so empty, so
ignorant that we just continue on like livestock. We hold our loved
ones close to our hearts, but do we ever explore each other? Is there
time? We live paycheck to paycheck, the rent and the cable bill and the
insurance digging into our brains and washing our souls of all purity.
Day in, day out, it’s the same walk. Today, we rest. Tomorrow, we hurry
back to work and we swallow the company line for a few bucks while the
boss walks away a rich man. Oscar Lewis is a man who never had that
opportunity. He died at 19.

Many die. They circle around us and they continue to breathe in our
ears even though their lives are gone. They all die and, in our time on
this world, we will carry them to the grave with us. We will feel them
at every step. We will hear their voices in the night, and we will
smell their perfume in the morning. Oscar Lewis died 59 years ago and,
tonight, he sat at our kitchen table. Today, he’s on Great Society.
Another meaningless article that will soon bump down and vanish. Words
from another wage slave, another troubled mind, another silly boy who
is ten years older than Oscar Lewis was when he bit a German (or
American) bullet on Christmas Eve, 1944. So what have I done? I’ve
dodged the bullets, I’ve lived here in the lap of luxury where
everything is provided. All these wounds I imagine, all these troubles
I cry for, and yet not a single thing really matters. Wake up, get out
of bed, make coffee, run to work, turn myself off for 10 hours a day,
every day. When the holiday and the weekend moves my feet and awakens
my mind, I’m too tired to care.

This is our story isn’t it? This vast, terrible emptiness beneath us.
These flashing signs telling us to max out every credit card, to live
beyond our means, to suffocate ourselves with debt and constant work.
This machine has gripped us, sucked us in, and it doesn’t even do
anything anymore. It doesn’t fight some great war. It doesn’t strive to
feed the hungry, educate the poor, or bring enlightenment to our lives.
It doesn’t push forward medicine and hope. Not for all of us. It feeds
only those who designed it, and those who imagine themselves in charge
of it. It feeds only greed, prejudice, fear. We brought our own Towers
down. You and I. The blood of each of those people, and all of the
others throughout the world, should burn our tongues. Pennies in our
mouths. Taste them? Feel it going down? Don’t swallow too much. You
might wake up.

There are no answers, you know. No solutions. Nothing different that we
can do. Yes, it is hopeless. Oscar Lewis, my grandmother’s first love,
died so that you can surround yourself with gifts today. So that you
can hurry back to work tomorrow, or perhaps Monday, and blindly pound
through the day for some paltry sum that you’ll spend on your useless,
noisy townhouse far from the bus line. He died so that you can be cruel
to the man or woman next to you. He died so that you can forget your
own history. He died so that you can not have enough time to read a
book or reflect on your life. He died so you could piss your youth away
in some cubical. God bless us all, Tiny Tim.