Dr. Warner Anthony lives in the woods. I had not been to his house in fifteen years—not since he was the clerk of the session in the church my father served—and you forget, in that amount of time, how beautiful a place is. Anthony's house is more than beautiful, it's intentional. The walls are mostly glass, a vast deck wraps around the exterior, and the light shifts and changes as we sit in his living room, talking about the people he killed.
“Does it bother me?” My father's friend sits with his back to the open window. A breeze stirs the air through the screen, threatening to sound the giant windchimes that hang from the ceiling. “Obviously it does, because I bring it up. But that was the price I paid for the job I was hired to do.”
The job: US Army medic, 99th infantry division, 395th regiment, L company. For his service, he received the Bronze Star, a presidential citation, and two Purple Hearts.
“I'm not ashamed of anything that happened,” he says as soon as we sit down. Like other veterans I've interviewed, he has little patience for small talk. “You can ask me anything.”
I remember standing in church and hearing Anthony's voice over the rest of the congregation. Like everything else he does, he prayed with intent. No idle recitation; Anthony spoke with the surety that God was listening. No one else in the room prayed like that except my father, and it was his job.
With the same intent, Anthony tells the story I've asked to hear. He joined the European theater just in time for what Americans call the Battle of the Bulge. Germans call it the Ardennes Offensive, after the frozen landscape in which it took place. By any name, the five-week battle resulted in American casualties four times greater than those of the decade-long War on Terror.
My father could remember hearing Hitler on the radio. “In the 1939-41 period,” he wrote in his memoirs about radio broadcasting, “international shortwave broadcasting was coming into prominence. We could hear, first hand, the nightly news from BBC, and the ravings of the maniac from Berlin.”
The thought makes my skin crawl. I've watched the Triumph of the Will, and listened to Hitler speak on YouTube. But to hear it live? It's a peculiar American horror, facing the fact that the second World War was not always history.
Transcription excerpt. Interview questions in bold.
Warner Anthony: So we went down to this first pillbox and crawled up on top of it. Now, you know, these pillboxes were interlaced. One pillbox covered another pillbox which covered a third pillbox. So you were under machinegun fire and mortar fire, so we went in there at night and built what we called a beehive charge. They were shaped like the hay beehives, you know, the fiber beehives. What happens is when you ignite that, it implodes in it.
MC: Shapes the charge down.
WA: Yeah, it shoots down. There was probably two feet of soil on top of three feet of concrete on top of this pillbox. And so the beehive charge went off and . . . only two of us went in there to look, and one guy stuck his head in to look, and said “we've killed everybody in there.”
And I went in and looked, and to this day I'm still sorry that I looked. Because every exposed piece of skin had blood coming out of it. The face, the eyes, the mouth, the nose, the back of the hands, the palm of the hands, all the skin was just exuding blood from the concussion.
MC: What made you look? Were you confirming kills . . . ?
WA: No. Idle curiosity. I've not changed that attitude at all. I want to see. It's in my nature. It's not always good or bad, but I wanted to see.
I have two conflicting feelings about this interview: Awe and guilt. I have this story that I want you to hear, that I believe you need to hear. But who am I to tell it?
I reckon that I am better educated about history than 99% of Americans my age, and yet my chief relation to the war is through video games. My next most intimate experience with combat is this first ten minutes of Saving Private Ryan, which invariably reduces me to tears. Everything that Anthony says about the American populace, quoted below, is also true of me.
I have no way of understanding what Warner Anthony went through. He told me so himself: “In your wildest imagination, you cannot conceive what we went through.” Then he stopped and rephrased it: “If you weren't there, you may not know what we did.” 
WA: We got there in early November. And from that day on, dusk was at four o'clock. Sunrise was at eight o'clock, and it was foggy all the time . . . We had five divisions online. The Germans had seventeen. They overwhelmed us . . . we had no buildup. We ran out of ammunition. We ran out of food. We ran out of everything . . . Our division covered a four and half mile front. A division in combat is supposed to cover a half-mile front. We were covering nine times what we should have been covering, because they said, “This is an inactive front.” But they were wrong. Hence, the Battle of the Bulge.
My father was a student of history. My much-discussed copy of Adolf Hitler was his. In addition to that, and his memoirs, he left this:
I wash my hands after I touch it. Why, then, do I keep it?
The romance of the second World War saturates the American subconscious. From thrillers to romantic comedies, Hollywood movies continue to use as a backdrop the familiar history of the war. We compare politicians we don't like to Hitler, and call any aggressive, regimented person a Nazi. We build stone memorials and inscribe them with noble sayings, and re-subtitle war movies with wry humor.
At the same time, there is a story I tell about my first day as a teacher: I told my class about Robert Capa's famous photos from D-Day, and they said, “Cool. What's D-Day?”
Genocide, my father once told me, “is the worst thing in the world.” And that thought has stayed with me, in this modern age when we believe that everything from public nudity to organic farming is a political act, throughout all the moral relativism of art school, surviving even my own existentialism. One thing I know is true: This helmet once protected a head in which Nazi thoughts danced like black lightning.
I keep it because there is great danger in reducing history to myth. The human condition is one of denial—look at Neville Chamberlin. We get so caught up in what we think, and what we suppose, and what we believe. And soon we'll tell ourselves that it never happened, and that, even if it did, it couldn't possibly happen again. But here, on my desk, is proof.
NPR reports that of the 16 million Americans who served in the second World War, less than two million are still alive.
At 86, Anthony is very much alive, though he wears a brace on his knee, and occasionally his hearing aides sing out with feedback. His small, good-natured dog barks at inopportune times as I record our conversation.
After the war Anthony became a chemist for Rohm and Haas, leading a varied career (including a brief stint as a photographer for National Geographic). In retirement, his life is full: He has many children and grandchildren that live all over the country. He has found a new companion after the death of his wife, and they travel together, alternating between the North Carolina mountains and Florida. He continues to serve the church, and continues to speak with his intent voice.
“We talked about forgiveness in the Bible class today,” he says, bringing up a touchy subject. I ask him if he's angry. But we're not talking about the Germans.
MC: How can you go through what you went through, and then look at the populace that we have to day, and not be angry?
WA: Oh, I'm angry. Oh, my God, I am really pissed off. Because I know that the responsibility rests with us. That's where the blame lies . . . and we Americans do not pick up that responsibility.
MC: Why not?
WA: It is a form of lazy indifference. And we are so busy knowing what the number one song is, we're so busy with Michael Jackson, we're so busy pouring money into a football game. Betty Ann and I have gotten interested in basketball. Every man on that court is making a million dollars. We have a whole disjointed society. What's the matter with us?
MC: I don't know. And as I said, I'm kind of a rogue journalist these days, and if I can answer that question, then I'll quit. And with politics, I don't even care about it anymore.
WA: But, you see, you cannot turn your back on it. You may not turn your back on it.
MC: I don't believe any of it makes a difference. Let me rephrase that: I don't think if I vote for Obama or Mitt Romney, it's going to be a dramatic difference either way.
WA: But you see, you were asking me earlier, did I feel like it was my responsibility to do what I did in the war. And I said to you, there was no one lower than me. I could not take the responsibility for that war, but I have the responsibility to speak out now, and say it's wrong. Maybe we can stop these wars because we can't afford the luxury of them anymore.
I transcribed much of our interview before deciding it wasn't enough. My recording was poor in quality, and much of it was interrupted by room noise, or personal conversation. But reading a transcript is nothing like hearing this story from that intent, purposeful voice.
So I added the audio to photos I took of Anthony that day, and below are the resulting videos. I've done my best to keep things unedited and truthful. I mark gaps in the conversation with transitions between the two photos.
As Anthony walked me out to my car, I tried to thank him for his service. He just shook his head; “Oh, come on.” I don't know what to make of that, or any of it. Half the men who served in L Company never came home. They are not here to be interviewed or thanked.
It's not my place to force gratitude on any of them. Why should they accept hollow honors from those of us who will never understand, just so we can assuage our guilt? The best we can do: Let the service of the dead stand on its own. Let the ones who came home speak for themselves.
Counting Kills: "I have no idea how many people I killed, but I was a very good shot, and I did a lot of shooting."
Medic Training: "That's one of yours."
Destroying Pillboxes: "To this day, I'm still sorry that I looked."
Joining Up: "It was the first time the Feds ever lied to me and fooled me. They continued to lie to me, but they never fooled me again."
Dec. 19, 1944: "We slaughtered 500 men."
Two Medics: "That's an American, kill him."
A Christmas Present: "I want to see where I fought."
Two Purple Hearts: "From then on, I carried a rifle."
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