A Day for a Non-Veteran, Too

I would like everyone to meet Herman Knose.

Herman is not a veteran because he never left the Army. Near Salerno, Italy his platoon was cut off by two German armored columns supported by heavy artillery and infantry. I have known Herman’s name for years. I have many friends who were with him on that day. Some tried to put together a defense and surrendered when it became hopeless. Some hid in barns, some ran for the woods along the river.

Herman may have done any or all of these, but no one knew then and no one knows now. We do know that after that day, September 11, 1943, the war moved on and left the countryside quiet and nearly deserted. In December, somebody walking in those woods - by now miles behind the front – came across what was left of Herman.

Herman’s 2nd cousin, Susan Knose, took interest in his story and came to reunions of the 2nd Chemical Mortar Battalion – Herman’s unit, and my father’s. She gave me this picture, and suddenly Herman was not a name. He was a cheerful-looking young guy with blond hair that I'm sure he thought was thinning too early. He reminded me very much of a Norwegian engineering student that I knew many years ago and I couldn’t help projecting that young man’s friendly, personable manner onto Herman.

Herman was married. Susan has become a friend of his wife, who was devastated by the long uncertainty of her husband’s fate and the eventual knowledge of his loss. Later she married again and raised a family. Somehow I think Herman would be glad for her – he doesn’t look like a man to resent others for having happiness that was denied to him.

One day I walked along a river in Italy, on the edge of the woods where Herman lay all through the autumn months of 1943. I wondered what he saw, what he thought as he disappeared into those shadows. I wonder still. I wonder about the farm he never tended, the career he never had, the house he never owned. About the children his wife never had the chance to bear him.

Susan found he was buried at first in Italy, and later was brought back to the U.S. and buried in a family grave. From there, wordless, he reminds me every day to be grateful for all that I have.
That is the only way I can give any meaning to the fact that I have so much that he never had.