Veterans’ Writing Group
A
young Austrian engineering student drafted into the German Wehrmacht travels
north by train through desolate landscapes. The war has been going badly on the Eastern Front, where his father is
listed as missing in action.
news has arrived that there’s been an attempt on the Führer’s life.
Elsewhere, the
youthful West Point-educated son of an Army general pilots a B-24 over
enemy-held
Though once on
opposite sides in World War II, Rapid Citians Franz “Frank” Morawa and Thomas
Oliver found each other at the Black Hills Veterans’ Writing Group. The group was an outgrowth of a 2005 workshop
to help
WWII veterans are dying at a rate of 1,500 each day. With them go memories of battlefield travail, comic interludes involving wartime buddies, and other poignant lessons from personal and family experience. For some vets, history books often fail to represent the “foxhole” or direct experience as they remember it. This is why they choose to tell their own stories.
The group’s motto remains fresh: “What I remember should not be erased from human memory. I must write. I must write now.” Several writers found that short stories, vignettes, or poems were the best vehicles for articulating their experiences. Many vets have adopted this mode of expression.
Those in the Writers Group discovered that memory isn’t always summoned as easily as might be expected. Names, times of events, and other details are forgotten. Those who kept journals, letters home, or photographs find recall easier, but keeping a journal is difficult in the extremes of combat, and cameras were off-limits to the typical combatant. Even letters home faced censors, and most were motivated not to alarm family about the stark realities of war.
Still, these letters served to trigger memories. Longtime Black Hawk resident Richard Perkins, a Marine machine-gun squad leader in the Pacific, noted in a 1944 letter to his wife that “I have given up all hope of getting back to the States this summer. It looks like I will be over here for the duration if I can dodge bullets that long. It is two years now since I saw [his young son] Randy and it will soon be two years since I last saw you.” He is amazed by how easily today’s military can use the Internet to keep in touch with family.
Serving with Perkins
in the Pacific was
Brandt’s story as written by another Writing Group member, Dean Muehlberg, appears in the current issue of Militaria International Magazine. Muehlberg’s recent book REMF “War Stories” is an exceptional autobiographical account of daily barracks life during the Vietnam War. His “war stories” atypically describe personal relationships that could have been great had it not been for the war.
Having one
veteran tell his story to another veteran has proved to be a good formula. WWII scholars and authors of several books in
the field, Ray and Josephine Cowdery of
One veteran,
Jerry Teachout, a retired USAF pilot from Piedmont, has described his experiences
in three wars: WWII,
The Writers’ Group meets at the Rapid City Public Library the second Saturday of each month at 9:00 a.m.; veterans are welcome to join the group at any time and write their stories for themselves, their families, or for others.
Bradford Morgan is SDSM&T professor emeritus. His brother Ron was killed in action along
the
Ed Hughes served in the