Staff Sgt. Raymond Wright was a decorated veteran of the U.S. Army during World War II. He was awarded the Presidential Citation and the Bronze Star for his service during the Battle of the Bulge. 

To me he was always lovingly just "Grandpa."

I was his first grandchild and his only granddaughter, and he was the man who would carry me around in his arms in church on Sunday; who let me put a whole tin full of barrettes in his hair while he laid patiently on the floor with me; who gave the strongest hugs of  any man; and who would butcher out loud, terrible, drawling versions of ' Way Down Upon the Suwannee River Far, Far Away' just to get my grandmother (my 'Sassy' as I called her) to give him a frown before saying, "The further the better, Raymond."

 He passed away in November, 2007; I miss him everyday.

 In 2002, my great aunt, Helen Morris, my grandfather's sister-in-law, interviewed him regarding his experiences in the war. She compiled them into a short narrative based on what he conveyed about his time in Europe serving in the Ninth Armored Division 16th Field Artillery; first at the treacherous Siege of Bastogne, and later as part of the first unit to cross over the Ludendorff Bridge at Remagen.  

She sent me a copy which I've held onto for the last eight years in a drawer. Although it's difficult to picture him as a young soldier, his spirit breathes through this entire work. I'm very grateful to my Aunt Helen for taking the time to compile this. I figured this Memorial Day would be a good time to share it -- both in honor of him as well as in honor of veterans and active servicemen and women everywhere and their stories.  

 War Stories: Compassion in Battle

As Told By Raymond A. Wright with Helen Morris  

  War is not like all the battles as written about or seen in movies. Since war correspondents weren't really in the battles like the soldiers, their accounts do not always show the reality of the courage and compassion even for the enemy sometimes that occurs on the battlefield. Eric Severeid was the only journalist who was there and wrote what really happened and how it happened. 

Most soldiers in battle tried not to kill people. They killed to keep others and themselves from being killed. They were humane and would much preferred not to have killed.

Being in a war is an hour by hour, in-the-present thing that has to be done. It is kill or be killed. It is going without sleep or food -- especially sleep -- for sometimes days at a time. After two days without sleep, I found an empty house with a bed. I was ready to finally get some sleep when I was called out to fight one more time; that is what war feels like.

After a particularly terrible battle, when only four soldiers were left alive out of 36 (I was one who survived), we came back to our command post and the colonel in charge, on seeing how few were left,  sat down and cried. Officers and men often cared very much about each other.

They sometimes care about what happened to the enemy soldier. When a bridge was taken by Americans, a straggler enemy soldier swam, perhaps mistakenly, to the American side and the officer in charge sent him safely across in the first vehicle to cross over. He may have been taken prisoner later, but he was not killed.

  In a farmyard one day, I rounded up a dozen Germans, herded them into a corn crib and padlocked it shut with a chain. Later, after fighting battles all night and into the day, I remembered they were still there with nothing to eat, so I took enough K-rations to feed them. They were so scared that I was going to kill them that their hands were shaking, and they could hardly open the packages. 

We would sometimes hear a baby cry, or a woman scream, or some other sounds of distress coming from buildings in the town we were fighting over. We would get them and put them together in one building where we could see that they were fed and were safe until the battles were over. We would have 40 or 50 at a time. We often gave away as much food as we ate.

The Germans used young women, dressed in white in order to be very visible, as guides to show them which direction to fire their mortars and other weapons. Of course, it put these women in great danger. They were shot all the time in cross-fire, so when we saw them, we ordered them to come into safe areas. It kept them from doing their directing job, but it also kept them alive. One girl refused and gave me a really rough time. She would not come off the street, so I hit her face (the only time I have ever hit a woman), her head hit a wall, and she bled all over. She came inside injured but alive. She was saved from being shot by our soldiers, even against her will.

There are a couple times I am sure an angel helped us; I have no doubt about it. Once, a house was suspected of being an enemy hideout, with guns aimed at us. I wasn't certain is was, so we held our fire. A soldier came up to me and said "That house might be full of enemy soldiers and guns." Then he walked to the house, looked in the window, saw it was a hideout, and then walked back to me. No one fired at him! I called for a strike and the house full of armed Germans was taken out.

Another instance when I know an angel helped me and my men was when we came upon a group of Germans obviously ready to fire on us. They outnumbered us, but our officer just boldly walked direcly into the enemy guns. They surrendered without any shots being fired! This was more than a show of bravery. I was sure we had divine protection that day. I am always reluctant to relate these two stories to many people, but I feel as sure today as I did then that angels saved us.

Not all soldiers acted in brave or even rational ways. One day, one of our men was firing a rifle inside the house we occupied. Investigating, I found him firing on innocent German civilians on the street. I yelled at him, and I cocked my pistol. I told him if he shot one more person, I would kill him. He didn't fire another shot, and I didn't have to kill him, but I would have done as I said without hesitation.

I was in a foxhole when I looked and saw a German soldier. In a split second I realized he was going to shoot me, and that he was a young boy of 15 or 16 years old. I fired and killed the young soldier. I had no choice, but I would have preferred over almost anything not to have had to kill that boy -- one of the few times I encountered the Nazi Youth.

Stories I have read and hear over the years about the Battle of the Bulge being fought against old men and young kids are totally untrue. I was there and those storm troopers we fought were the toughest and strongest and smartest Hitler had to use as a last-ditch effort to turn the European battlefront around against the Americans and Russians. A lot of close-range, almost hand-to-hand fighting took place and they were not young boys. In some instances, men of both sides shared foxholes after negotiating their own private "truces" perhaps with a bottle of wine, then each returning to their own side. I witnessed this. 

Once, a buddy and I were observing an area when we jumped into a foxhole and straight onto a German. We took his gun and emptied it of bullets. The German jumped out to run, and was hit in the knee by airplane strafing. We grabbed him and told him in broken German that we would get him to an American hospital. Then, he said he wouldn't be in prison, whipped out a pistol, and killed himself. We really wanted to take him alive but couldn't. 

Even the soldiers fighting the Battle of the Bulge knew about the jealousy and rivalry among the commanding generals -- Eisenhower, Patton, England's Montgomery, and others. Each wanted to be the hero of the European Operations.  Such  rivalry was probably responsible for needless battles to be fought and lives to be lost. 

The Germans, in the Battle of the Bulge, took U.S. weapons and uniforms off prisoners and dead G.I.'s and wore them to deceive and destroy the U.S. soldiers. So, at times there was a great confusion as to soldiers' identities because these Germans also spoke good English and knew American slang. Passwords were used extensively as a safeguard. I was in a place once where I didn't know the password and feared I would be shot by the guard -- even though he knew me! It took a lot of talking and getting someone else of higher rank to identify me before I could pass through. The guard was ordered to shoot anyone who didn't know the password, and he meant to follow orders. He would have carried them out if his superior officer hadn't known me, too. 

One day, we were driving a jeep loaded with ammunition and weapons to a point behind the lines, and along the road we saw a U.S. soldier in the snow with no shoes, feet bleeding. We picked him up (he had to ride on the roof of the jeep because it was so loaded) and when we got to the base camp, the commanding officer couldn't take the crippled soldier in. He had to have all able-bodied, battle-ready men. I ordered the jeep driver, after dropping off the material, to take the soldier to the hospital. I had wrapped him in blankets and  just hoped he would be all right.

I heard screaming one day and saw it was a German woman on the street who had crushed  her hand with the tongue of a cart. She was in great pain, so I ordered a medic to go down and treat her wounds. This was during a battle, but she needed help and we could give it to her, so we did. 

We had some close calls. Germans had covered a crossroad where Americans needed to go through with supplies by using a crossfire method. They fired across one side and then across the other. We needed to go through to get the crossroad cleared by a strike force. My partner and I timed the firing and noticed a short lull between firings which occurred at regular intervals. We went through the intersection in a pause between shots and weren't hit.

Another close call was when I needed to go up a road held by the enemy that was being used to move heavy trucks and equipment. That night, timing is what saved us. We waited and observed that the vehicles were kept evenly spaced, so we went close beside one and our jeep was never stopped or fired on. We did take chances.

After the war was over, I had to stay on for awhile and help process prisoners of war. We had a record of the crimes they had been charged with. Some of them had been hardened criminals even before the war and had committed terrible crimes against civilians during the war. One prisoner in particular had been charged with hundreds of deaths. I was curious to see what such a man actually looked like, so I went down to his solitary confinement cell and looked in through a small window. Our eyes met and I swear I was thrown backwards by his glare. He was pure evil!

Some prisoner's names were on the military criminals list by mistake when they had the same name as a real criminal. We worked to weed out those names and make sure we notified their families that they would be treated well and returned sometime in the future when prisoner exchanges took place. We didn't have to do this -- it was the humane thing to do. It was what we would want done if we were prisoners of war. 

We had captured a village and had everything under control when we discovered one building emptying out. Several Nazi officers came out on the street, surrendering very quietly. We shamelessly help ourselves to their shiny pistols. I wore one through the rest of the war.

The political and military minds directing the wars don't have any idea of the feelings and emotions a combat soldier has experienced. War is not really as it is grandly and excitedly depicted in movies and books. It is fought in day-by-day decisions of life or death made by ordinary people like me. Its images stay with you forever.