For My Grandpa

I started watching the show Band of Brothers on DVD, and it's really good. But as I watch it, I think a lot about my Grandpa Johnson, who was also at Normandy. He wasn't in the 101st Airborne like the guys in the show, he was an MP, but he was still there. He didn't say much about his tour of duty, save for a few vague things here and there. Even my Grandma didn't know what he went through. The only time he talked about it was when my Uncle David came home from Vietnam, and they traded stories. But no one was privy to the details of that conversation. He essentially took his secrets to the grave.

I wonder what he went through, and the fact that I will never know drives me insane.

Here's what I do know:

At Normandy, the Nazis liked to switch road signs to get the Allied troops lost, so my Grandpa's job was to go around and switch the road signs back. He rode a motorcycle to do this, and went with three other guys. Two men rode in front, and two men rode in back. Grandpa was in the back. Also at Normandy, the Nazis liked to use boobytraps. So one day, as my Grandpa was driving around with the others, they unknowingly came on a trip wire stretched over the road at about the same height as their necks. The two men in front ran into the trip wire and were instantly decapitated. But for the grace of God, Grandpa wasn't in the front.

I also know that Grandpa was in a company that stumbled on a newly abandoned concentration camp. I don't know it's name, but his company found it. It was just like on that episode of Band of Brothers called "Why We Fight." Grandpa never described what he saw, but once, he sat my dad down and told him one of the only things he ever said on the matter: "The Nazis were pure evil, and they had to be stopped." My Grandpa wasn't prone to making blanket accusations against people, but he must've saw something so terrible that they'd done that there was no doubt in his mind what they were.

"Pure evil." I can't fathom what that looks like. I've been to the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C., and I've studied WWII and the Holocaust on my own for a long time, so I've seen pictures and read statements. But to see it with my own two eyes, I can't imagine it. But Grandpa didn't have to imagine it because he did see it. And all he could bring himself to say was "pure evil."

I wish I knew what he went through. Maybe it would be hell on my psyche, this knowing. They say ignorance is bliss. But I feel that we, as a society, are forgetting what kinds of hell the soldiers endure, and as a result, are becoming apathetic to them. I don't want to be apathetic to them, I want to know what they know, because then it reminds me why we fight. I can't let their memory fade into oblivion, and I certainly can't let my own Grandpa's stories fade as well.

But, what can I do?