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A World War II soldier's letters bring back the horrors of war

As a member of the Ninth Infantry Division, it was my cousin Bobby's lot to be tethered to the front line in some of World War II's most fearsome fighting.

Pvt. Robert C. Paul, left, on crutches in England after being wounded in combat.  Right: A letter home after he was wounded.
Pvt. Robert C. Paul, left, on crutches in England after being wounded in combat. Right: A letter home after he was wounded.Read more

As a member of the Ninth Infantry Division, it was my cousin Bobby's lot to be tethered to the front line in some of World War II's most fearsome fighting.

Normandy. The Huertgen Forest. The Battle of the Bulge.

He rarely mentioned any of it.

But when he lay in the hospital, dying of cancer in the spring of 2009, he couldn't stop talking. And the morphine made his accounts suspect. It wasn't clear what he'd seen, what he'd dreamed.

When an uncle sent me a box a few months ago stuffed with my cousin's letters from the war, I finally had the opportunity to learn about the events that shaped him, and that helped tear him apart.

At first Bobby wrote home so often his letters didn't bear the date, just the day.

"Thurs," begins an early correspondence to his mother from infantry camp. "The boys thank you for the food. Even C rations would taste good."

Pvt. Robert C. Paul was undergoing training at Fort Meade, Md. He was writing back home to his mother, my great-aunt Ethel.

"My moonshiner friends built a blazing fire in the downpour and I kept warm for a while. But then I had to fix my booby traps."

The year was 1943. Bobby was 19, a bespectacled twig at 5-foot-9 and 130 pounds. When he was drafted, he'd just finished his third year at Harvard College.

Bobby always thanked his good fortune to be paired with Southern boys who were crack shots. He was an unlikely warrior, a sensitive soul who loved Abbott and Costello movies, Walt Whitman poems, and his mother's fruitcake.

He was, by his own account, the world's worst soldier, the very label one of his drill sergeants pinned on him.

"Fine," went Bobby's reply. "Then send me home."

Instead, they sent him to Normandy on July 1, 1944, three weeks after the invasion. Bobby's father was dying of kidney disease, and after a short leave my cousin caught up with the 39th Infantry Regiment, the fighting already in progress.

Most of his letters are written in pencil and scrawled on stationery from the USO, the Army, the Marine Corps, whatever he had handy. He reported to his mother, a fellow cinema fan, on the movies he saw on leave. He asked his father about baseball, hockey, and the ponies. He hungered for news about his many cousins and friends back home.

The chatty tone ended with the letter dated Oct. 16, 1944:

"Here it is blue Monday and I am in Paris. It took a shell to get me here. I am all right, feeling better physically than mentally. I got it in my left arm, but it is not too bad. I'll be none the worse for it when I get better."

He tried to assure his parents that the hospital was modern, the doctors first rate. He didn't want anyone worrying, or blaming themselves for letting him ship out, as though they'd had a choice.

"This is devilish business and one has to have faith," he wrote. "I thought that the battle would make me a stronger person, but I realize how weak I still am. When the shock of combat has worn off, I realize that it is but a bluff, that mask of bravery that I have been carrying on under."

Bobby's recovery took a couple of months. He had been back with his company in the Huertgen Forest for just a matter of days when he was mortared again.

His wounds that time were serious, despite the Army telegram that reported he'd been injured only "slightly."

The shell landed Jan. 11, 1945, in Belgium near the German border. Shrapnel blew off bits of three toes on Bobby's right foot and raked his thighs and arms. He was evacuated to a hospital in England.

He tried to dwell on the positive when he wrote his mother on Red Cross stationery:

"I was very fortunate this time because I was wearing glasses and had no helmet on when I got hit. It was around midnight and they had to use a snow buggy to get me out. The company medics are the heroes of this war because they take care of the wounded regardless of the risks. They go through everything with nothing but a red cross for protection."

Now Bobby talked about how the war was going from his perspective, how although everyone was talking about the Russian offensive, he felt the Germans were too stubborn, too tough to quit so soon.

He'd fought for seven months, across France to the Ardennes, then helped capture Roetgen, the first German town conquered in the war. He was exhausted.

With the war winding down, he must have sensed he would not see combat again - he'd be sent home after five months in the hospital to recuperate at Camp Edwards in Massachusetts. He received his discharge from there that summer, a 21-year-old private first class awarded the Purple Heart.

For the rest of his life, Bobby would rally support for antiwar movements. He never let my brother and me play with guns.

"The experience I went through wasn't pleasant," he wrote from his English hospital to his mother. "It didn't prove anything, but it was part of my sacrifice for my country. I haven't done much, but some of my critics should have been over here. This is the infantry's war, but they will get no credit when the war is over. The rear echelon boys who have it made will be the toasts of the town. I'll be glad enough to just get back to you, but I will know that I did my part."

When we were about to clean out his house in Sharon, Mass., a year ago last spring, Bobby wanted to make sure we grabbed the Nazi flag because some people might not understand why he'd kept it. I wrote a column about my dilemma: What's the right thing to do with it?

We wound up giving it to the town's historical society, with his obituary and my column. They're all on display today, Veterans Day. The woman who runs the society said they describe the flag as a souvenir from the war.

I have to think Bobby would laugh at that notion, as though the Nazi flag were some trinket, like a miniature Eiffel Tower, and not the symbol of the evil that made him reach so far down inside himself, not the reminder of the blood and the screams and the terror he endured.

Or maybe his voice would rise excitedly, and he'd yell, because little things would often upset him.

Reading his letters, I have a better sense why.