Loneliness,
My wife and I have been married for 60 years and we had a boy friend-girl friend relationship for 10 years before that. In the 58 years since I returned from overseas service in WWII, we have rarely been apart for more than a day or two. But I remember well those years when we were apart and they were the loneliest times of my life.
My first Army assignment after OCS was to an Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, N.C. We married and rented a room on a cotton and tobacco farm owned by a caring elderly couple, the Elliots. Those were among the happiest days of my life. But after only eight weeks, it all came crashing down around me. Because of staggering battle losses in Italy, Infantry replacement officers were in desperate need. As junior officer in my company, I received orders, along with several others, to report to a Port of Embarkation. In record time, I was on my way to the Anzio Beachhead in Italy. There were 5,000 Infantry replacements aboard our troop transport. I didn’t come home for 2 years! Five hundred of the others never came home at all!
In Infantry combat, life takes on an intensity unmatched by any other form of activity. There is fear, and there is valor in overriding the fear to do what has to be done. There is awesome responsibility. Responsibility not only for the mission but for the lives of the 35 enlisted men under your command. There is enormous satisfaction in doing the job well. A whole gamut of emotions sweeps over you with an intensity that cannot be imagined. And one of the most powerful of these is loneliness. Men fall around you and you can’t help but wonder when your turn will come. The statistics your brain takes aboard tell you that you can’t possibly survive. You will never see home and your loved ones again. But there is no satisfactory alternative to going on and doing what you have been trained to do. There is no end to the War in sight. You have no doubt that you will go on until you are killed or so badly wounded that you can’t be patched up and sent back to your unit.
You write often and treasure the letters from home. Your wife at home is in your thoughts at every quiet moment. A hopelessness comes over you because you know that no one in this Regiment is going to make it to War’s end, an event which is not even on the horizon. Common sense tells you that. And yet there is that thread of hope that you reach out for. Maybe it won’t happen to me. You know it will, but maybe, just maybe . . . And you go on, and on, and on.
You are surrounded by hundreds, maybe thousands of men, yet you feel alone. The only ones you see are the men in your own platoon and even they are spread out so you see only a few at a time. Your training tells you that you are responsible for these men, for their well-being, for their very lives. They’re not friends, not buddies, there is no familiarity. You call them by their last names. They call you “Lootenant,†pronounced with two o’s and the accent on the first syllable.. They are your charges. The Army has arranged things so that you exist on two different levels, officer and enlisted man, even though you share the same foxhole, rations, clothing and blanket. The Army tells them that they must respect you and follow your orders without question. The Army tells you that you must earn their respect by looking after them, keeping them fed, clothed, and as safe as is reasonably possible consistent with performing the mission. You both take that charge very seriously. Your lives depend upon it.
What about the other officers in your company? Can’t you make friends there? Somehow or other it doesn’t seem to work out, primarily because you are physically separated most of the time. It’s not like an Army post in the States. There you see each other at reveille formation, three times a day in the mess hall, at the officer’s club after duty hours and perhaps in the BOQ. In Infantry combat, there are no formations, and meals are eaten alone right out of the C ration cans you carry on your back. There is no officers’ club, no BOQ.
I have heard it said that officers and men alike avoid making friends because it only hurts that much more when your friend “gets hit.†In my experience, that line, and others like it, come only out of a movie script. Aside from physical separation, the reason Infantrymen don’t make friends is because of the high rate of turnover. People come and go constantly and they all remain strangers. In my regiment, wartime battle casualties came to 500% of average strength and non-battle casualties (evacuation for malaria, trench foot, pneumonia, accidents, etc.) took another 500%. The Division goes on because of a continuous flow of replacements coming up from the rear as the casualties are evacuated. On average, every spot in the Regiment is filled at one time or another by ten different men. The average length of stay is measured in weeks and the overlap between individuals is even less. It’s not uncommon for a man to be evacuated before others even know his name. How could he possibly have made friends?
During his time in combat, he is constantly lonely because he knows no one. He has never been so lonely. Nor afraid. If he is wounded, evacuated and later returned to his unit, he will find few familiar faces. Those few that he may have known will have been hit and replaced. And this applies to junior officers as well as enlisted men. After replacements are assigned to units, they never see each other again.
It’s a terrifying, miserable, and above all, lonely life in an Infantry Company. The only personal objective, the only hope, the only prayer is for survival. Because survival means return to your loved ones and an end to the terrible loneliness.
Russell W. Cloer, 10/19/97 Rev. 11/14/97 Rev. 5/5/98