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In memorial: A brother and uncle and the horrible price of war

Jay Dieffenbach
azcentral sports
Margraten's cemetery for American soldiers in the Netherlands.

Late in the spring of 1976, a reporter from Seattle flew to London for a conference, a rare overseas trip in a long career covering the news.

While he was there, he had enough time to make a side trip. He flew to Brussels, rented a car and drove east into the countryside, until he crossed into the Netherlands and arrived at a village called Margraten.

A memorial there honors Americans who fought the German army on that soil in World War II. The cemetery is the resting place for more than 8,000.

The reporter was a tourist for the day, but he was seeking one specific headstone.

After his visit, he filed a dispatch for his newspaper, the Seattle Times, which printed the story on May 30, 1976, the Sunday before Memorial Day. The piece went out on the news wire and was picked up by other papers across the country.

The headline: “Hello again, Brother Rudy.”

It began this way.

Margraten, Holland –

With the philosophizing about Vietnam not yet ended, it is a sobering experience to visit another place, another time, and to stand among 8,301 headstones of men who died in World War II.

Especially heavy on the heart is the sight of one white marble cross that bears the family name.

I read the story that year as a boy growing up in Seattle, too young to have thought about the Vietnam draft. Then, as now, war had mostly been a distant thing on television or in the newspaper.

Then, as now, few of us knew someone who had gone to war and not come back.

This story, though, felt closer. I was standing on the damp grass with the writer, somehow beginning to recognize a heartache I had never really understood.

For me, it was closer. The reporter, Al Dieffenbach, was my father. The soldier he was seeking — his older brother, Rudy — was the uncle I had never known.

“Rudolph A. Dieffenbach, Sgt., 16 Inf, 1 Div, New Jersey, Mar 30, 1945.”

Hello again, big Brother Rudy.

It’s been 34 years since you went away to war. Then you were killed, and 40 days later the war in Europe ended, and I know inside me that it broke Mother’s heart. She died months later at age 53.

I’m not going to explain this visit. It has to do with pride and sadness and Daddy, who is 88 and might like to have more of a memento than, as he puts it, “two Purple Hearts and a certificate.”

Anyhow, I came to London on an assignment and I found I could fit in a visit to this Netherlands American Cemetery and Memorial near this village.

And I am so achingly sad, so impressed and so proud that I have to let tears fall on the impeccable lawn of the burial area, a hauntingly beautiful place, but too little for the sacrifices that were the price of admission. ...

It must have taken valor, and dedication and forbearance to travel as a warrior, the oldest of seven children from North Africa to Sicily, to D-Day, through Normandy and across the Rhine as a member of the 1st Division, America’s famous “Big Red 1.”

It took grit to do the things a foot soldier does in war, to go where a soldier needs to go to fire a bazooka, to direct a machine-gun squad.

What could demand 2 ½ years of such service from a young man — the young men — who fought so long and well? It must have been a different kind of war.

The aide in the cemetery visitors’ building , a 24-year Army veteran himself, said that it was. He pulled an old sheet of green record paper from a file cabinet:

“Infantry. Purple heart. Battlefield promotion. Bazooka man. Machine-gun squad leader. Oak Leaf Cluster . . . “

For my big brother, six years older? For a guy who wasn’t any star athlete, nor very big, nor a street fighter? Who never liked guns? Who would rather have worked on an old automobile? Who was an apprentice with a lower New York printing firm?

“Plot A, Row 8, Grave 20,” the aide said almost apologetically as he looked up from the sheet. 

It seemed like a simpler time: Americans at war in Europe, the story clear. By Vietnam, the controversy was stronger; by the time of conflicts in the Middle East, it was hard to separate war from politics.

All through it, there would be a constant thread of loss.

Al Dieffenbach, in his earlier days as a reporter.

As my own life led me into the news business, I would read about more people lost in war. Some made headlines on their own — Lori Piestewa, Pat Tillman and, just weeks ago, a former track athlete named Charlie Keating. Some did not. Still, I would return over the years to that story I read as a boy, the first one that had made the loss of war feel closer.

My father kept a journal of that trip. Had an hour and a half to kill... make that two hours — the flight would be half an hour late, he had written.

Like a good reporter, he sprinkled in a handful of details — how he helped a traveler in the airport negotiate the pedal-activated sink to wash his hands.

I had to put up 4000 Belgian francs for deposit on the car, he wrote. Most of the two hour drive was on two lane roads with the center one for passing. 

The Belgian houses are of dark brown brick. They look sturdy but blank. 

In his notes, as in his life, he had a gift for critical observation, never compromised by unnecessary emotion.

Which made the piece he wrote all the more illuminating — the poignant, personal words he had written to his brother Rudy.

I remembered the paydays best, I guess, when you would come home on Friday nights with a little brown paper sack of penny candy for us younger kids.

And Saturdays, when you and Vouringer, Volckmann and Abramowitz — an ethnic mix that in itself typified America’s war effort — would gather to make some old car well again.

The three others came home from their war, you know.

Ironically, two years after you left, I was delivering telegrams for Western Union. Lots of them had one purple star on them, signifying that somebody’s brother, or son, or husband, or father was wounded or missing.

And fewer, but still too many, had two stars, a notice that the message inside was “killed in action.”

The first one we received had only one star. The second, with its two stars, lay unopened for four hours on the mantelpiece until Daddy came home from work and Mother’s fears were borne out.

Forty days before the end of the war in Europe. Two and a half years after induction, with never an hour’s visit home in between. During actions described as “merely mopping-up operations” as the shattered German army fled eastward.

The fateful action, the cemetery aide said, was near the village of Mengeringhausen, across the Rhine, pretty close to Essen, Germany, where, we were told, our paternal grandfather had come from.

What could have happened in “merely mopping-up operations”? Might a 2 ½ year infantry combat veteran have become careless to a battered enemy? Was the unit sent in over its head?

And what, especially, was the situation we pieced together from V-mail letters which indicated you had broken an arm just two weeks before the fatal action? Fighting house to house with an arm in a cast?

Our two-star telegram emptied our hearts, as similar messages emptied other American hearts. We put a gold-star flag in the living-room window and had a memorial service at our church.

My father died 11 years ago. I picked up this story again recently. Even now, I am both humbled and proud when I read it. But I’m also struck by what it tells me about this holiday, this idea.

A war that seemed distant then is only more distant now.

Those 8,301 soldiers buried at Margraten were just a fraction of all we lost. We have not inflicted such a toll on ourselves since then. But perhaps that has made each loss easier to ignore.

A story like his reminds me that Memorial Day is just that — it is no cheering parade, no celebration. It is a memorial day, for memories of someone gone forever.

Perhaps that’s what makes his final paragraphs so hard for me to read, even now.

I remember how, each year, all seven of us kids used to be called up on the church stage to receive another bar for our perfect-attendance Sunday School pins. I think you had a pin, a wreath and nine bars on yours, making 11 years of perfect attendance.

They always called you first because you were the oldest, and I knew I’d never be able to match your record.

I still can’t, and it is beginning to rain, and I’ve been here long enough, drenched in emotion, humility and pride, and angry at my loss and at the ultimacy of the price that you and your comrades paid.

Many still remember and are more sad than angry now. But mankind in general has a poor memory and a monstrous selfishness that will not yet allow it, like you, to rest in peace.

Margraten in modern times: People attend the 60-year commemoration service ahead of Memorial Day at the Netherlands American Cemetery in Margraten, southern Netherlands, Sunday May 30, 2004. A total of 8,302 war veterans and war victims are buried at the cemetery.

The story "Hello Again, Brother Rudy" is reprinted here nearly in its entirety, courtesy of the Seattle Times. It ran on the front page there May 30, 1976, and was later nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. 

Jay Dieffenbach is pro sports editor at The Arizona Republic and azcentral.com.