My love of reading came early, and not just from my teachers. While we did Dick and Jane in school, my most important first grade reader, however, was something rather different: a large format, beautifully bound, copiously illustrated tome called The Fifth Infantry Division in the ETO. I found it one afternoon in a cabinet where various family treasures were stored. When I opened the book, marvels emerged. Almost every page had pictures of soldiers in combat gear, of tanks, of cannons, and other martial wonders. Even as a six year-old, I knew a bit about these things. This was 1956, and television — we’d just gotten our first set — had all sorts of military shows, which I watched with rapt attention.

That night, when my dad came home from work, I met him at the door, book in hand: “What book is this, Daddy?” He took it from me, regarded it with a faraway look that was beyond my childish ken. “It’s the history of my division during the war,” he eventually answered. When reading time came that night, instead of a Golden Book, I brought out the big blue book. He was unenthused, but my mother intervened and encouraged him to give it a try. Many years later, I came to understand that she thought it might do him some good as well. (RELATED: If Your Kid Can’t Read This, Thank a Teachers Union)

It took a while, but we found a rhythm, roughly a page a night, with pauses for the occasional commentary. Moreover, in much the same manner that he’d read to me from all the children’s books, he read slowly, and traced each word on the page with his fingertip, so that I could begin to associate word, sound, and, bit by bit, with meaning.

Our nightly sessions continued this way. I stopped him frequently for explanations. Before we got through the Normandy hedgerows, I had already learned such terms as “burp gun,” or “line of departure,” or, importantly, “57mm anti-tank gun.” He’d been the reconnaissance officer in an infantry anti-tank company, and “getting the guns up” would become a recurrent theme. He was never pedantic, always fascinating, and each night drew us together into the world of his war.

Occasionally he would pause to offer a recollection. One drawing depicted a dead cow, and this prompted a lengthy aside about all the dead cows and horses he’d seen in Normandy. He’d grown up on a dairy farm, and I could see that this pained him greatly. Another time he mentioned an ammunition fire on a truck towing one of his 57mm guns, hit by a German 88, but his role was left maddeningly unexplained. This, too, was typical. He rarely offered personal asides, and never did he offer anything to cast himself in a heroic light, or explain his receipt of a Bronze Star.

That didn’t mean that he was immune to heroism — quite the contrary, he always paused to take heroic passages slowly. And so, page by page, I came to a kind of awestruck understanding of the ways and means of heroism, and self-sacrifice, in the context of battle. I’ve probably reread portions of the division history a hundred times in the years since he read to me, but it’s the names that he highlighted then that still resonate the strongest. Mostly these are associated with the bitter battles for the Moselle River crossings near Metz, and the cruel and bitter battle for Fort Driant.(RELATED: Heroism Now and Then) 

On Hill 386, the key to the Arnaville bridgehead, there was Captain William B. Davis, whose company was hit with a tank-infantry counterattack. Having suffered crippling leg wounds, he rolled himself down the hill to rally members of his company. I found this utterly fascinating, and perhaps missed my dad’s emphasis on the sequel, when Davis was killed by mortar fire as he lay on a stretcher, waiting to be evacuated.

Unmentioned as we read this passage together, was the fact that my dad was only about a hundred yards from Captain Davis’s position when all this happened, subject to the same small arms, tank gun, and mortar fire. I only worked this out many years later, when I walked the ground with French friends from the commemorative groups “Thanks GIs” and “The Friends of Fort Driant.” But that omission was typical.

We paused on many other heroes. Dale B. Rex, a 19 year-old ex-BYU basketball player, took over a machine gun when the gunner was slain, manning it despite the exposed position, and killing dozens if not hundreds of Germans as the tiny bridgehead was crushed by repeated counterattacks by fanatical SS troopers. Then, when the bridgehead finally collapsed, he swam the river multiple times under fire, trying to help the wounded and non-swimmers to make it to the other side. As a little boy, I couldn’t quite wrap my head around machine gunning Germans, but I was taking swimming lessons at the time, and his swimming heroics seemed awesome.

And then there were George Dickey and Frank Lalopa, two ordinary soldiers manning an outpost on the periphery of the Dornot bridgehead. Ordered to fall back within the perimeter, they refused to do so, instead manning their foxhole, armed with nothing but rifles, and blunting a German counterattack. When dawn came, two comrades crawled out to discover them dead, surrounded by 22 dead Germans, some on the very edge of the foxhole. Sadly, their bodies couldn’t be recovered then, and, when the Americans regained the area, the bodies could not be found. Even as a child I could sense how moved my dad was as he read this passage, and it has moved me ever since.

About the time we reached the Battle of the Bulge, my dad became increasingly reluctant to read the division history with me. At some point in the Moselle passages, I could sense a change, something far beyond my understanding, something that I’ve tried to understand down through the years since. I now understand that those days brought more concentrated horror than he wanted to recall. I’ve seen photos of the woods on Hill 386, reduced to stumps and splinters by tree bursts, and the shattered remnants of the little village of Arry, the pivot of the battle for the Arnaville bridgehead. Years later, he let slip a remark about two of his fellow lieutenants who “cracked up” that first morning in the bridgehead, but never, ever spoke about the horrors he saw in less than a week, in the space of a few hundred acres, where nearly a thousand members of his regiment were killed or wounded, or went missing. (READ MORE: A World War II Veteran Remembers December 7, 1941)

What had been nightly became weekly, and, then not at all. As my reading skills improved, I carried through to the end of the story, across the Rhine and into Czechoslovakia. Looking back, I know that almost everything I’ve done in life was somehow shaped by that big blue book. It informed my first career as an historian, my second in national security, and my retirement career as a thriller writer. When I set out to write my first novel, I wanted to do three things: Tell a good story, else why bother; dramatize the threat from China; but, above all, describe the price real heroes play, rather than simply depict them as comic book superheroes, impervious to pain and heartbreak. 

Mostly, my Fifth Division heroes didn’t survive the war. Not Captain Davis, not Dale Rex, not George Dickey and Frank Lalopa, nor many others who populated the pages of that big blue book. Today we cheapen heroism by disassociating it from real sacrifice, but I won’t beat the drum about sports “heroes” or “Hollywood heroes” today. What irks me more deeply, however, is our valorization of victimhood. Victims deserve our sympathy, and their pain deserves our best efforts to bring succor. But heroes are not victims. They run into the burning building, dive into the raging torrent, push the baby stroller from the path of the onrushing car. And, when needed, they hold a line of shallow foxholes against tanks and waves of infantry.

We need to do better than equating victimhood with heroism, and we need to provide our children with an understanding of the meaning of heroism, rather than feed them the pabulum that so often passes from children’s literature today. C.S. Lewis, who knew a thing or two about writing for children, and about the horrors of war, found it ludicrous to sanitize children’s stories of scary things. “It is so likely,” he wrote, “that they will [someday in life] meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage.” How ironic that the same educators who insist on bringing sexual materials to increasingly younger children would likely recoil in horror at the stories my dad read to me.

The Fifth Division’s only Medal of Honor winner, medic Harold A. Garman, earned the accolade by diving into a river under heavy machine gun fire and swimming out to a small boat filled with wounded that German gunners were trying to sink. Not a pretty picture, but one redeemed by Garman’s heroism as he brought the wounded safely to shore. When General Patton later bestowed the medal upon him, he asked Garman why he’d risked his life in this manner. Garman simply looked at him and said, “well, somebody had to do it.” 

I now understand the sacrifice my dad made in revisiting hard memories as he read to me from the division history. I suspect that he somehow understood that my path in life would be better for learning early about heroes. Looking back from the vantage point of nearly seventy years, I know that he was right. I hope that our most recent generations of veterans will take this to heart, and give their children and grandchildren a similar gift.

James H. McGee retired in 2018 after nearly four decades as a national security and counter-terrorism professional, working primarily in the nuclear security field. Since retiring he’s begun as second career as a thriller writer. His 2022 novel, Letter of Reprisal, tells the tale of a desperate mission to destroy a Chinese bioweapon facility hidden in the heart of the central African conflict region. You can find it on Amazon in both Kindle and paperback editions, and on Kindle Unlimited.