God back then.....and Now

Althouse is hosting a pretty interesting discussion about Mother Teresa and her suddenly revealed doubts about the existence of God; doubts that were raised because of the total and endless misery she encountered all over the world for fifty years. I had a great uncle who was in the 82nd Airborne that crossed France into Germany in 1945 and was one of the very first to actually see a concentration camp and the starving Jewish prisoners. He never spoke about it (nor did he speak about his heroism, a part of him that earned two bronze stars), until I met him at a First Communion for a relative. We were shooting the shit when he blurted out the opinion that if there really was a God he didn't want to ever meet him. I was startled and after a few more minutes of bull shitting with him I asked him why he felt that way about God. His eyes sort of rolled into his head, remembering something he'd forgotten long long ago and was just then recovering from the whiskey soaked hard drive in his soul. He told me of the shock all the guys felt when they went into the camp, the screams of the GIs as they saw what had been perpetrated, and the fact that he vomited for almost two hours after first seeing the human skeletons staring dumbly at them, apparently unable to comprehend anything. He moaned for several days and too came to the "Teresa Conclusion," meaning that there could not possibly be a God who would allow such a thing to happen. When he recovered slightly he went out on a mission with the sole purpose of killing any German he found.

"I'm lucky that the only Germans I found were soldiers."

He said it without elaboration but with a trace of anger, and the look in his eye told a volume and a half of what he did with who he found. Any of us who sees the day to day misery of real people will have, at the very least, doubts about God, and many of us share with my late uncle the opinion "that I never want to meet Him."

As a member of our "Greatest Generation," the one that endured the worst depression in the history of the country and the horror of WWII, he never spoke of battles, war, or anything much of the days between 1940 and 1946. I can only imagine what one of today's "me me me" generation would do, by that I mean the gutless shitheads pissing and moaning from the safety of college campuses around the country and DNC headquarters in every city in the land. Endless TV appearances on Opera, Meet the Press, and Jay Leno come first to mind, followed by his mommy bitching that he hadn't won enough medals because he was (black, Hispanic, Catholic, etc.) and that he was "owed" enough money to go to Harvard. Those kinds of people would make sure that we all forgot him as fast as we could.

The really brave guys, the ones in Iraq and Afghanistan, say nothing, which I think is what really brave guys around the world say.

BTW, after my great uncle died his kids found his Army memorabilia in an attic. Included were the six citations for bravery and descriptions of what they were for. He had never told them about what he'd "done in the war, Daddy," but all of us were in awe of what a brave mother fucker he was.

And finally we knew what had made him an alcoholic for nearly ten years after the war.

It goes without saying that none of the medals or citations were for the agony he felt when first seeing the concentration camp prisoners. The only thing you get for something like that is a contempt for God.

If there really is one.