Kevin Heaton Verse-Virtual 2015 January

January 2015

I am a scuba diving, distance running, retired park ranger grandfather living in South Carolina. My work has appeared in a number of publications including: Guernica, Raleigh Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Vinyl Poetry, The Adroit Journal, and The Monarch Review. I've been nominated for Best of the Net, Best New Poets, and three-times for the Pushcart Prize. http://kevinheatonpoetry.webstarts.com/

Editor's note:

This month Verse-Virtual joins with poet Kevin Heaton in honoring his father, Albert Heaton.

Introduced by Kevin's childhood recollections — and followed by his poetry — here is the firsthand account of Albert Heaton's experience in the U. S. Army during World War II. This is a man who fought tyranny with all his strength — who was only eighteen years old when he gave everything but, thank God, his life — in order to do the right thing. A man who is now 88 years old. A man who deserves far more recognition than we can possibly give him.

Please read this incredible story and send your comments to Albert Heaton at oheaton@cimtel.net and to Kevin Heaton at kevinspoetrysite@gmail.com

A L B E R T H E A T O N

Introduction
by Kevin Heaton

M Y F A T H E R , A H E R O

On Saturday mornings in the late fifties, I would crawl into my parents' bed and listen, wide-eyed, to my father’s war stories while mother prepared breakfast.

He spoke to me of Bastogne, The Siegfried Line, Bonn, The Rhineland, Ardennes-Alsace, and the Ludendorff Bridge at Remagen, where he had been among the first soldiers to cross the Rhine River into Germany. He told of being pinned-down under a hay wagon while each man took turns sprinting to a small schoolhouse for food rations. How a bullet had struck a brick just above his head and he began to bleed. Thinking he had been shot, he began to pray to God for his soul. He told the story of being left alone to guard twenty-five Nazi prisoners in a farmhouse, and how they had watched him all night hoping he would fall asleep so they could slit his throat. Of marching through the Arc de Triomphe to the cheers of French citizens. He showed me the still-bloodied German Youth knife he had pulled from his buddy’s chest.

As I grew older, I discovered that he had dropped out of high school his junior year to enlist, (like so many other young men at that time) hoping to see the world and find adventure, only to be thrust into the worst European winter on record. Just another warm-bodied, eighteen-year-old youth to be hurled at what was left of the Third Reich. Nevertheless, even at such a young age, he nurtured a strong sense of patriotism, and was honored to serve. A sense of patriotism he carries forth into the present, as each day, he raises and salutes the American flag on the front porch of his home in Mannford, Oklahoma.

My father dearly loved his family, but at times, grew extremely angry and frustrated. As a teenager, I would curse at my father during those times, and challenge him, not knowing macabre visions of death still had a grip on his heart.

Some fifty years later, while watching a World War II documentary, I realized that my father had been one of the soldiers among the 47th infantry sent into Dachau to muster and oversee male civilians from Landsberg, Germany, in properly burying the partially decomposed bodies of Holocaust victims. I began to weep. For the first time, I understood his anger. This was much too grim to have ever been a part of our Saturday mornings. For nearly sixty years, he had borne this burden, alone. A burden we all would have been proud to help him bear, but one he could not bring himself to share. When the program was over, I called my father to ask him if he had been at Dachau. He said: ‘Yes,’ and began to cry.

This past November, I asked my father once again to tell his war stories.
Here is what he told me.

My Recollections of World War II
by
Albert Heaton
as told to his son, Kevin Heaton
November 2014

The eyes of his outrage lie ashen—
shrouded in a fallen rose. .
K. H.

In the fall of 1944, I was eighteen and in the eleventh grade. Myself, Marvin Ratliff, and six of our buddies (all students at Council Grove High School) determined we would answer our country’s call, and proceeded to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas to enlist. They had one line for navy enlistees, and another for the army. We decided it would be to our advantage to serve and see the world more comfortably on clean, swift ships, so we all lined up together to join the navy. That notwithstanding, many others had applied the same strategy before us, and as a result, the army had fallen behind on meeting its quotas. In an effort to rectify the situation (and unbeknownst to us) the recruiting sergeants had agreed to temporarily switch desks, and we soon found ourselves being issued army green. At this point in the war, replacements were in short supply and sorely needed for the Western European theatre, so we all did a shortened version of basic training; myself and two others at Camp Walters, Texas, and Marvin and the rest of our group at Fort Chaffee, Arkansas. Immediately thereafter, we began our journey overseas aboard an old oil tanker doing service as a troop carrier, spending much of the trip “Over There” heaving our meals off the side of the ship while virtually everything else not battened down, slid back and forth from bow to stern to the belly-roll of each monstrous wave, only to arrive in Western Europe during the worst European winter on record. Marvin and I were both assigned to the 47th Infantry Regiment, but I to C Company, and Marvin to Company A. As fate would have it, months would pass before we would see one another again.

Casualties had reached extreme levels during the final desperate Nazi blitzkrieg, and the brittle, frozen bodies of our fallen were often seen being loaded onto three-quarter-ton weapons carriers like cord wood.

It was during the capture of Geldern, Germany that I lost my footing on a wooden plank bridge and fell into the creek, losing my carbine, and being soaked through three layers of clothing which froze to my skin in sub-zero temperatures. That night, as my partner Popcorn and I lay hunkered down in our foxhole, an eighty-eight mortar shell exploded just above my head. The next morning when I called out to him, he didn’t answer. Popcorn had been struck by shrapnel at some point during the shelling, and had died right there in the foxhole with his eyes open.

We shuffled in and out of The Bulge, through the Siegfried Line and winter forest, taking the Monschau-Elsenborn sector and driving back the 272nd German Volksgrenadier divisions with
a powerful assist from our artillery. We were frozen, and had gone many days without sleep to a point where death would have seemed merciful. Then, it was on to Remagen to do battle for the
Luddendorf Bridge and make clear the way for Patton’s 3rd army to cross the Rhine River and proceed on to Berlin. At the far end of the bridge I caught a glimpse of Marvin during our rapid
advance. He appeared badly wounded. I later learned that he had survived.

As the war began to wind down, our division continued on to the Harz Mountain region, then eastward to Nordhausen, all the while encountering sporadic but fierce enemy fire, and taking
on many prisoners. I recall guarding an abandoned farmhouse full of young Nazi troops all night, and how they stared into my eyes hoping I would nod off long enough for them to cut my throat
with one of those famous swastika-adorned youth knives they all carried.

Eventually, we joined ranks with the 337th Russian Rifle Regiment, thereby linking the Eastern and Western fronts.

In mid-April, 1945, (just prior to Germany’s surrender) while awaiting deployment to a financial disbursing unit under the command of Major Robinwitz at the Swiss border, my unit was
assigned cleanup duty at Dora-Mittelbau and Dachau. As we approached Dora Camp in 6x trucks laden with wheelbarrows, (from several miles out) the air already permeated with a rancid
odor. Upon entering the camp, the first sight we beheld was a ghastly series of long, freshly-opened pits filled with emaciated dead bodies all piled on top of one another.

We donned the gas masks we had been issued, and unloaded from the trucks, dispersing in groups of 10 to 12; wheelbarrows in tow. Our orders were to muster the remaining Nazi prisoners
and local townspeople, and charge them with the grizzly task of dragging the bodies up out of the trenches, loading them into the wheelbarrows, and transporting them to alternative burial sites.
We stood watch as they dug fresh individual graves and reburied the dead, making sure they marked each with a newly fashioned white cross. These reluctant volunteers displayed little visible remorse, and although I had become somewhat hardened to death, they made me ill to my stomach, along with a stench that we could only withstand for thirty minutes to an hour at a time. On occasion, a gaunt, half-dead survivor would be recovered from the pits and we would have them transported to first aid to be ministered to. Witnesses later reported that many of these unfortunate human beings had endured unspeakable hardships, and a long-drawn-out system of torture for days at a time.

Upon leaving Dora, we repeated this same morbid process at Dachau, after which we were pulled back to a bivouac area on the outskirts of Munich to shower and change uniforms; luxuries we
had not enjoyed for three months.

As mentioned previously; prior to these camps, we had borne witness to much death and carnage: in battle zones, along roads, and through forests and bombed-out villages. So much so, that to
an extent a certain numbness had taken hold. And, although there were those among us who refused this duty, the majority of us still felt enough of a sense of compassion and duty, to see to it that these who had been so horribly wronged be treated honorably in death. Though not a religious man at the time, I have since become a believer, and if asked to do it all over again, I would: for my family, my country, and for a people with whom I now share a profound faith in the same God. A faith that continues to bear new fruit since that awful time so many years ago.

Respectfully submitted,

Tec 4 Albert Heaton
47th Infantry Regiment/9th Infantry Division
2 Unit Battle Stars: The Rhineland & Central Europe
The Distinguished Victory Ribbon

Kevin Heaton
THREE POEMS INSPIRED BY MY FATHER'S WARTIME EXPERIENCE

The Battle For The Rhine

I know a gentle, loving man
who had to go to war.
A brave and valiant journey,
rarely mentioned anymore.
I never heard him once complain
bout what he had to do,
or ever blame his country,
for all that he’d been through.

He fought the battle for the Rhine;
that bitter, burning hell.
Paid our price for freedom,
and lived to tell the tale.
He marched across the frozen fields,
helped to hold the line,
and there became my hero,
at the Battle For The Rhine.

The painful scars must still be there,
etched in his mind, I know.
His frozen, youthful comrades,
upon the bloodstained snow.
Yet, he never speaks of pain,
he loves his country so,
and speaks of pride and privilege
in having had to go.

He fought the battle for the Rhine;
that bitter, burning hell.
Paid our price for freedom,
and lived to tell the tale.
He marched across the frozen fields,
helped to hold the line,
and there became my hero,
at the Battle For The Rhine.

Why Dachau, Why?

Flesh colored mounds; twisted, and mangled.
Skin and bone heaped into piles ten feet high.
Children of Zion in barbed wire halos;
heirs to a throne, sacrificed to a lie.

Lambs into glory on altars of darkness.
Demons wretched spoils, stench to the sky.
Ghastly assemblage of vast devastation.
Homage to evil, thousands who died.

There in the midst of a people now broken;
one soldier glimpsed the blink of an eye.
Among the dead, a fading life lingered.
We got there too late, why Dachau, why?

Eretz Yisrael

Gather the people as desert blossoms
into bouquets of many colors; testimony
to Four Holy Cities. Bring the harvest
unto Zion: pomegranates and figs, sated
granaries, artesian wells for continuance,
unbreached wombs—tight with jubilee.

Embrace not the kisses placed in palms
of those alone, or soothsayer orations
in a house of many serpents. Beware
thieves astraddle dark horses with spears
dipped in asp savor. Hold fast—
cast weary eyes skyward.

-first published in Poetica Magazine