Re: Looking for your story

Donna Spisso (spisso@pradeshta.net)
Sat, 21 Feb 1998 12:46:30 +0600 

BARKMAN, DAVID THOR wrote:
>
>         I am a university student in my last year of school before becoming a
> teacher. I have just joined this mailing list so I have not had the
> opportunity to listen to many of the stories that you have so willingly
> shared. I would like teach my Language Arts class a lesson about the war
> and wondering if one of you could share a story that I could share with my
> class.
>
>  Thank-you, I appreciate what you are doing on this mailing list.

Dear David,
        Here is an article I wrote about my father's most oft-told
war story. It appeared in the Luxembourg News for the 50th anniversary
of the Battle of the Bulge. He died at the age of 81 in Nov. I am happy
to share this story with you and your students.
Sincerely, Donna M. Spisso

A Christmas Memory, Bastogne, 1944

        The American soldiers had been invited to Christmas dinner at
the home of some Parisian school teachers.  Rejoicing at their
liberation, the
French took every opportunity to express their gratitude, especially to
the paratroopers who had jumped into Normandy the previous June.
        My father, Michael Spisso, was one of them, a member of the
101st Airborne division which had liberated Carentan.  After Normandy,
he had taken part in the Dutch campaign and was now back in France.  A
home-cooked meal in the company of a family was a prospect to be
savored.
        “Of course it never happened,” he said.  “The Bulge broke
through and
they loaded us on trucks and drove us over a hundred miles to
Bastogne.”  On December 23, a shell landed close to my father on the
front lines, shrapnel piercing his left thigh.  He was carried to a barn
with the other wounded.  Snow fell relentlessly, food was scarce, and
the temperature plunged below zero.
        “Finally the medics loaded me onto a jeep.  We were headed
toward the company aid station when the artillery started coming at us.
Everyone dove for the ditches, leaving me exposed on top in the
stretcher.  I
yelled at them to get moving, to get me out of there.”  The jeep raced
out under a rain of bullets and made it to Champs, 3 km. from Bastogne.
        At the aid station, located in the village church, Dr. Choy
examined my father.  “You are one lucky soldier,” he told him.  With his
leg shot up and the pain severe enough to require morphine, he naturally
wondered
what kind of luck the doctor meant.
        “Every stitch of clothing you have on is cut clean through, as
if someone did it with a razor.”  Choy ran his hand across Spisso’s
back,
separating the five layers of clothing with his fingers.  The skin was
miraculously untouched by the shrapnel which had apparently sliced over
him as he lay hugging the earth.  Spisso recalled the seconds before his
leg had been hit.  “If I hadn’t flinched when the shell came in, it
would have cut my head off.”
        Not long afterwards, his buddy Dodsworth showed up in the church
hospital with a swollen face, as if suffering from a severe toothache.
“What happened to you?” Spisso asked.  “I got hit between the shoulder
blades; a bullet came through my neck and lodged in the roof of my
mouth.  I reached in and popped it out.”  He produced the bullet from
his pocket and held it up.  They laughed, as only soldiers can at such
freakish occurrences.  The next day, despite his condition, Dodsworth
was sent back to the front lines, a testament to how desperate things
were getting.  German tanks were now only 100 yards away from Champs.
        The 30-40 stretcher cases in the church could do nothing but
shiver and listen to the sounds of fierce battle surrounding them.  “I
still had my
45 with me, hidden under the blanket.  Nobody knew about it.  If the
Germans broke through, chances were that they would spray the heck out
of us.  I was going to get one or two before they got me,” said Spisso.
        Supply lines were cut, leaving the wounded without food.  Relief
came from the army chaplain who had received a large bag of dehydrated
pea
soup from home in the last mail.  With careful rationing, he was able to
feed each man a half-cup of cold pea soup per day.  That was Christmas
dinner, and for the next few days it was also the soldiers’ only means
of sustenance.
        Finally, when the Germans were a mere 200 feet away from the
church, the Americans knocked out the last tank and drove the infantry
back.
Patton broke through on the 29th and opened up a road.  The wounded were
evacuated to a field hospital elsewhere in Belgium.  There my father’s
leg was X-rayed and his wound sewn up.  The doctors did not think it
necessary to remove the small piece of shrapnel.  Thus, like Dodsworth,
my father came home with a souvenir from the war, one he would have no
chance of misplacing and which would cause shrinkage of the wounded leg
by almost a full inch.
        Every Christmas Eve, the veteran performs a solitary ritual.  He
takes out his X-ray, holds it up to the light, studies it, and relives
the
Battle of the Bulge.  For him, it meant discharge; for the Allies, it
meant an end to the war; for many others, it simply meant death.  For
the survivors and their children, the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle
of the Bulge marks the passing of an age.
—Donna M. Spisso
December, 1994