A Soldier’s Word

In other words, Carl—the Ohio-born soldier Carl Lavin, 18 when he enlisted and a member of the 84th Infantry Division at the time he wrote this—was offering his distant parents back home in Canton an epistolary goodbye cloaked in the kindness of concealment and the remembrance of unstinting affection. It was possible—maybe probable, as the boy realized—that this 1945 letter written in the last year of World War II would be his last, and I don’t know when I’ve ever been so moved—moved to tears, actually—by a bald white lie.

A month earlier, the Battle of the Bulge had begun through the Ardennes forest in eastern Belgium, a deadly conflict that caught Allied forces completely off guard thanks to an intelligence failure, and it would continue for yet another terrible month. By the time the salutary words “warm and comfortable” were penned, young Carl’s platoon had lost 20 of its 40 members, and the frozen earth, insubstantial utensils, and bitter weather made the digging of foxholes by GIs especially brutal work. By the end of the battle, there were 100,000 German casualties, as well as 81,000 American casualties.

So, almost certainly, Carl Lavin was not seated by a cozy fire when his note was dispatched to the folk in Canton. But that’s the way war then was: teenage boys growing old, careworn, and selfless overnight—old and selfless enough to airmail terrified parents back home that kind of fictive comfort, in part because the parents needed the lies, and in part because the military censors demanded them.

In Carl Lavin’s old age, there would be a change, a reflective remorse over some of this forced narrative, as Frank Lavin, his son and compiler of the many letters that compose Home Front to Battlefront, points out. The censors “blocked off the heart and soul of our experiences,” he told his son. “We were repeatedly reminded by our officers to give no details as to place, actions, casualties. .  .  . This was in case some mail would fall into the hands of the enemy.”

There is, therefore, an occasional sameness in the contents of some of the letters contained in this volume of lovingly compiled war and postwar missives: constant pleas for candy and reading matter; references to a certain Edith, who (the soldier prophesizes, incorrectly) “I’m going to continue to love .  .  . for a long, long time.” There are mentions of Sugardale, the family-owned meat products company in Ohio. But oddly, it is that very repetition that gives this compilation its compelling honesty. This is what soldiers write, especially when they are forbidden to write everything. Lovers, chocolates, home, siblings, and parents: These are what they think about and yearn for when they are tired and cold, anxious, scared, and uncertain about tomorrow.

It isn’t only the letters themselves that win over the reader, however. Frank Lavin, a onetime Reagan White House political director and, later, ambassador to Singapore, fills in the martial and historical gaps his father was forbidden to provide. From the younger Lavin we learn, for instance, that because certain German soldiers were expert at infiltrating Allied lines, American units

But equally intriguing: Who was Mickey Mouse’s girlfriend? ultimately got reduced to joke status by the very men it was designed to protect, although only when the fortunes of war improved for the Allies. In time, its sardonic revival became “a universal statement of meaninglessness,” according to Lavin, a shorthand way for weary soldiers to describe the insanity of combat. In fact, many of the important revelations here occur decades after war’s end: Carl’s reflections on the one death of a German soldier he is certain he inflicted, for instance; his reminiscences of initial confusion about whether the enemy soldier was, in fact, really dead or just lying on the ground immobile; his initial reluctance (confided with stunning candor to his son) to ensure by firing yet another shot that the German was absolutely, and without question, dead.

“Do I really want to take a human life after having shot at him, and he’s just lying there?” is how the elder Lavin recalls his wartime thoughts.

As the old man reveals to his son, the German soldier had been cut down by Carl Lavin’s first shot. But to me, that’s not the point. There aren’t many men willing to tell the whole truth about a war—and not just about World War II—any war. Not to the reading public and, maybe above all, not to their own offspring. That’s the thing about war: It kills not only soldiers and civilians, it often kills the truth. But Carl Lavin was willing to take his chances. As he points out, he came out of World War II whole—absolutely whole, even though only 15 percent of his company survived that way. The rest were killed or wounded.

“I was impossibly lucky,” he tells his son.

Judy Bachrach, a contributing editor to Vanity Fair, is the author, most recently, of Glimpsing Heaven: The Stories and Science of Life After Death.