First Person - May 19, 1999

The healing moment
At its 50th reunion, a wartime class comes to terms with its collective past

By William Zinsser '44

In the five years since our 50th reunion I've often thought back to that Saturday morning in Alexander Hall when the Class of 1944 finally made peace with all its wars. "We will always be a wartime class," I had written in my introduction to our 50th-reunion book, and in the spring of 1994 that idea was strongly on my mind when I visited the American cemetery at Omaha Beach. I had gone there to write an article about the forthcoming 50th anniversary of DDay.

What struck me about the cemetery was the gift of absolution that it offers to people who visit it. Typical of that gift was a story I heard from the cemetery's superintendent, Joseph Rivers.

"An American man came here last year," he told me, "who had served with a naval combat demolition unit [NCDU] on DDay, clearing mines and other underwater hazards. He was my first NCDU -- we almost never get one of those. I met him walking among the graves with his two grown grandsons, both of whom were doctors. He was very tense, very nervous; he had blocked the whole DDay experience. He said, 'My wife didn't want to hear about it and my inlaws didn't want to hear about it, so I've been passive about the whole thing.'

"Suddenly he just opened up, for the first time in 49 years. It all started coming back to him in a flash, and his grandsons stood there staring at him in amazement: they had never seen that grandfather before. He just had to get it out. And as he talked, his entire frame of mind altered. He said he felt good, and he realized that he had had a satisfying life. The cemetery just changed his whole outlook." Rivers also mentioned a domestic spat between a husband and wife that he couldn't help overhearing. "The wife said, 'We've been married 47 years and I've never heard any of this before.' Maybe after that day she had a little more appreciation."

That cemetery stayed with me long after I got home. I had assumed that my generation of men had come to terms with World War II; I didn't expect the experience to have been withheld from wives and children for half a century. But when I told friends about the NCDU who spilled everything after 49 years, they weren't surprised. Several middle-aged women said their fathers never revealed what they did and what they thought during the war. The women felt that this was not only a deprivation for the men; they themselves felt deprived of knowing something important about their fathers. They resented having been shut out.

All these thoughts and emotions came crowding together for me at my 50th reunion, one of life's summarizing events. Our reunion happened to fall on the same weekend as the 50th anniversary of DDay. All week long the invasion of Normandy had been replayed in the media; the memory of June 6, 1944 -- the turning point of our war -- was part of the baggage we all brought to the reunion.

The main event of the reunion was to be a class gathering on Saturday morning in Alexander Hall, one of those 19thcentury Victorian monstrosities that adorn every American college of a certain age and luckily never got torn down; they are beginning to look almost beautiful. It was in Alexander Hall that our class in its original strength had last been together, one week after Pearl Harbor. The Japanese attack put the campus in shock. Nobody knew what to do; our first impulse was to rush out and enlist. The only thing we knew for sure was that life as we had known it was over.

Into this vacuum Princeton's president, Harold W. Dodds *14, moved with a swiftness that we were everlastingly grateful for, bearing the most precious commodity of the brandnew war: information. Convening the entire university in Alexander Hall, he told us he had been in touch with "Washington." Washington said it had its hands full and didn't want us right away. Washington would call us in its own good time. Washington wanted us to stay in college and get educated for "the war effort." I can still hear the silence in that auditorium as we strained to hear the president's words that held our fate.

THE GREAT DISCONNECTION

So began the age of "acceleration" at Princeton. Through the winter, spring, and summer of 1942 we took courses that were compressed and elided, like a speededup movie; we were amassing wisdom, which Washington in its own wisdom would use to crush the Axis. But the great disconnection had begun. Every week more students and professors slipped away into uniform. The texture of college life unraveled, and eventually 562 of us -- 82 percent of the men in our class -- went off to the war. Only a relative few were still around for the senioryear rituals that normally bind a college class together.

After the war our officers worked hard to put Humpty Dumpty together again, and the class identity was restored. Nothing, however, was ever quite the same; too much glue had been lost. Over the years I found myself far more attached to individual friends in the class than I was to the class itself.

But as our 50th reunion approached I felt that something beyond mere obligation and loyalty was pulling us back. The reunion began on Friday night with a class dinner. I was startled to find myself among so many old men, and I scanned their faces, delving for some trace of a person I might have known as a freshman. But even allowing for the accretions of jowl and paunch and white hair, many of these men were strangers; the class had been dispersed long before we could get to know one another.

Yet a large number of men seemed to be back. Later we would learn that the class broke Princeton's alltime record for 50threunion attendance and also for the size of the class gift, both in dollars and in ratio; 85.4 percent of the class participated. That surprised me. Had the war that fragmented us become the bond that was pulling us together?

A HUNGER FOR CONTINUITY

On Saturday morning we gathered in Alexander Hall, most of us accompanied by our wives. Matrimony, that muchdefamed institution, never looked better -- many of those marriages began as dates on the Princeton campus in the early 1940s. Caroline had never been to a reunion with me; I told her I couldn't do this one alone.

Alexander Hall had been handsomely refurbished, but I'm sure I wasn't the only person who felt old emanations from under the new paint. The ghost of Harold Dodds was perched somewhere in the rafters. Princeton's president had further won our affection during the war by sending periodic form letters to everyone who had gone into the service, assuring us that we were not forgotten. One year he enclosed a list of 100 Modern Library books and said the university would send us any three, wherever we were. I got my Don Quixote at a sandblown base outside the Algerian town of Blida. Shakespeare's plays caught up with me in a snowblown tent near the Italian town of Brindisi.

Saturday morning's program was simple. Four of us had been asked to give brief talks reflecting on some aspect of the American experience as it pertained to the class. As the designated first speaker I thought I should put the reunion in some kind of historical context. I had recently made a pilgrimage to 15 sacred American sites to write a book called American Places, and I mentioned that the strongest current I had found drawing visitors to these places was a hunger for continuity. At Yellowstone Park, for instance, a high percentage of parents bringing their children to the park were first brought there as children by their own parents.

"Continuity is what this reunion is all about," I told my classmates and their wives and children and grandchildren in Alexander Hall. "That's what has tugged 266 of us back to this American place where we began our journey together half a century ago: an urge to stay connected to each other and to our shared past. So I'd like to tell you about the sacred American place that I visited most recently: the cemetery at Omaha Beach. I don't need to tell you why it's on my mind today; the 50th anniversary of DDay is the day after tomorrow -- we've all heard it coming."

I talked about the cemetery's perfect location high above the English Channel, and about its immaculate rows of white crosses, and about the longrepressed NCDU who found absolution there, and about all the European visitors who say "the Americans did it for us," ending with the words of Joseph Rivers: "The news that 'the Allies have landed in Normandy' was like a beacon in the sky. It must have been the most uplifting thing. The men who died here did something very unselfish." The stillness in Alexander Hall as I described the cemetery was a presence in itself, filling every crevice. The absolving cemetery had extended its blessing to us all.

The last of the morning's speakers was Hervey Stockman, a fighter pilot who saw action in all our hot and cold wars: World War II, Korea, the first U2 flight over the Soviet Union, and Vietnam, where his plane crashed and he spent six years in a sevenbysevenfoot prison cell in Hanoi. He had been reluctant to talk about that ordeal as a prisoner of war, but the class officers asked him to try, feeling that in his character and his generous heart he represented the best of what the class set out so long ago to be.

"Preparing these words was much like visiting an old, untended graveyard," Hervey Stockman said, looking out at us from the lectern, a trim man with a warm smile. He began by describing the brutal treatment he received in the early months of his imprisonment -- "I was a foul, decrepit wreck of a man" -- and then recalled the slow process by which at last "my mind was awakened and reunited to my body and I had the will to live and regain my strength." He spoke slowly, barely controlling his emotions, but without selfpity, and when he walked back to his seat, his slightly stiff gait betraying his long captivity, the class rose in an ovation that had no relation to the applause usually heard at the end of a speech: mere handclapping. It had tremendous solemnity -- it was emotional without being sentimental -- and it rumbled through the auditorium. Most of us were crying or reaching for a handkerchief; Caroline later said she had never seen men cry so comfortably. Perhaps we were crying for ourselves. In that moment we were healed.

PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE

And then it was over, and we were back out in the warm June sunshine of the campus, enjoying a lighthearted lunch and enjoying each other's company. Afterward we gathered in front of Nassau Hall for the Prade. I couldn't help remembering that I first marched in that parade as a small boy, wearing the orange-and-black jacket of my father's class of 1909. When the band struck up a medley of Princeton marches I could hear my father singing those songs to me as an even smaller boy, hardly out of the crib. They are almost the first songs I can remember.

By tradition the Prade moves chronologically, the oldest classes marching first, and when our turn came we walked between all the classes that entered Princeton after we did. At first the faces flanking our route weren't much different from our own: white, male, Eastern, Protestant, welloff. But then the palette shifted, and we began to see women's faces and black faces, Hispanic faces and Native American faces, African and Japanese and Chinese and Southeast Asian faces. Together they formed a mural of how the college where we arrived as freshmen in 1940 has changed for the better. They all looked good, and, judging by their cheers as the Class of 1944 walked past, so did we. We had put our collective past to rest and could get on with our lives.

William Zinsser '44 is the author of On Writing Well and many other books. This essay originally appeared in his class's 55th reunion book, published in February.

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