Some World War II veterans still find the memories so
difficult that their families long ago learned not to ask not to probe
behind those hooded eyes and troubled silent frowns. Sons and daughters
bite their tongues pondering the silences wishing for a way to see inside
those graying heads and know what their fathers know
He
never talks about it," is what they always say. OB
Hill, 72, of Cathedral
City Calif didn’t talk about it for 30 years
“It’s not normal to run
around watching people being shot and shooting them, seeing people blown
up and blowing people up. The cause was right but that part wasn’t.
“I
just kept all of it bottled up. I tried not to think about it but I did
anyway almost daily”
Only after he revisited Normandy for the first
time in 1974 did he begin to open up about his experience and become
more like those other veterans — who knows what makes them different?
— who literally have spent their lives recounting the details of the
war
OB Hill and a group of fellow paratroopers spent their first five
days in Normandy lying in a farm field pinned down by a force of
Germans who were guarding a bridge into the town of Chef du Pont. Ultimately Hill and his men were rescued by other American forces.
Two days later well-fed and somewhat rested, they were sent back to take control of
that same bridge
That was when an artillery blast struck Hill in the back peppering him with shrapnel sand and rocks and — though doctors didn’t know it until years later — breaking neck vertebrae that disabled his left arm. He joined the growing throng of wounded men hospitalized in England and he stayed there for months while medical people worked in vain to rehabilitate his damaged arm.
Eventually he couldn’t sit around any more “My outfit had jumped into Holland by then” he says “My left arm was still not right but I got out.
“I took off on my own went to the airbase and hitched a ride back”.
Reunited with his old regiment now filled with replacements for dead and wounded Normandy veterans, Hill fought on through the notorious Battle of the Bulge in Belgium and then was wounded again by artillery shelling much the same as before and hospitalized again until the war was nearly over. With others of the 82nd Airborne's 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment he ended his military career as a member of the honor guard for Gen Dwight D Eisenhower. Today he says what so many soldiers say “I did what I knew I was supposed to do. Most of us were like that. It wasn’t that we were brave We were trained.”
