In the summer of 1997, I drove out to Woodstock to the home of Jay Wenk, a World War II veteran and local member of Veterans for Peace. Jay had participated in our veterans' evening in Woodcrest that August, and I was impressed by the depth of insight he had offered on wartime recruiting and propaganda.
It didn't take long for us to get down to the business of the interview, and we were soon in his wood-paneled kitchen, discussing the background to the war, pacifism, patriorism, and pscyhopathology. Playing devil's advocate, I questioned his assertion that World War II was more about money than fascism: didn't Hitler need to be stopped? His response was short and to the point: "Of course he did. But so did Wilson and Roosevelt and Truman and McNamara and Johnson and Reagan."
Though Jay has seen his share of firefights, they are not among the memories that have left him the most scarred. I was caught off guard when, about half-way through our interview, he shared his "most horrific" war story with us, one he had never told anyone else in neary fifty years:
I wanted to share with you my own most horrific story. It's quite different from what the others were. It's at least part of the reason why I feel that young men and women shouldn't go into the services.
Towards the tail end of the war we were almost out of Germany and approaching Czechoslovakia. We captured a town not far from Schweinfurt, where they were making ball bearings and bombs. There was another factory making radios for the Wehrmacht. And there was a small camp full of displaced people or prisoners who worked at the factory. Like many of these labor camps, it ws operated by a private firm. My patrol was going out to the eastern edge of town. We took up a spot at the very end of the village.
There was a little cottage where my patrol was domiciled overnight. Every once in a while one of us was supposed to get up and stand guard duty. After it got dark the patrol leader came back. He had gone away some place and came back to our cottage with five or six women. He had given them cigaretes or chocolate or whatever, black-market stuff. And they were brought there to have sex with us.
I got into bed with one of those women and had intercourse with her. It was the first time in my life. The first time in my life, under conditions like that. I don't know how to describe the horror of it. It didn't hit me till laer. At the time, you know, you got into this cot and bang, bang, bang, that was it. But later...
Early the next morning the man who was on guard ouside rousted us all out of bed. He had seen a German squad up in the woods on a hill right next to us. We went running up the hill and there was a little bit of a firefight. The Germans took off pretty quickly, but there was shooting going on both ways. Nobody was hurt on our side, and I don't think any of the Germans were hit either. In any event, coming back down the hill, going towards the cottage, we saw the faces of these women looking out the window.
We had just been chasing, looking to kill, their husbands, their brothers, their uncles. There they were, looking at us - not with hatred in their faces, but with a kind of curious inquiry of some sort that I can't describe. I still see them looking at me, at us. I felt guilty and embarassed and tried to justify doing what we had to do. It was a horrible evening, a horrible night, a horrible morning.
I could tell you other kinds of war stories, but that was the most horrific. To use women like that, to go anywhere near that kind of thing, there's a poison there which can infect. Even in so-called peace time. i've never told that story before...
The day before we crossed the Thine we were in the city of Mainz. I was rummaging around, walking around in the basement of this apartment building. There were chicken-wired cubicles, with people's furniture and God knows what. Locks on the doors. Walking around, I heard a woman cry out. It was nearby. I followed the sound. There was a young woman - I guess she was in her late teens or early twenties - a German woman, and and she was holding what looked like a big loaf of pumpernickel. My squad leader was trying to pull it away from her. I said to him, "You can't do that." He gave me a look of disgust and said, "She's German." I said, "She's a civilian, she's a woman, she's hungry. We have plenty of food. We're not starving."
We did have plenty of food. The look of disgust, I won't forget. He turned and left. The next day I was sent to the heavy-weapons platoon, meaning I was loaded down with cans and cans of 50-caliber ammunition. It was painful. The whole incident touched a guilt button. One of my guilt buttons went off, and I remembered that story from "my basement."
There was a little cottage where my patrol was domiciled overnight. Every once in a while one of us was supposed to get up and stand guard duty. After it got dark the patrol leader came back. He had gone away some place and came back to our cottage with five or six women. He had given them cigaretes or chocolate or whatever, black-market stuff. And they were brought there to have sex with us.
—Hell, Healing and Resistance
