"Whites should read this book to learn of Baker's accomplishments against a background of severe prejudice. Blacks should read it for the heroism it reveals. Everybody should read it for the power of its narrative." --The Washington Post
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Editorial Reviews
About the Author
Orphaned at age four, Vernon J. Baker was raised in Wyoming by his grandparents, in a town with just a dozen other black families. During adolescence, he spent two years at Father Flanagan’s Boys Home in Omaha, Nebraska. He graduated from high school in Iowa, worked as a railroad porter. He fought to join a segregated army, and was sent to Italy with one of the few all-black regiments to see combat in World War II.
Mr. Baker fought in Italy, earning a Purple Heart, Bronze Star, and Distinguished Service Cross. He was one of the most highly decorated black soldiers in the Mediterranean Theater. On January 13, 1997, fifty-two years after Mr. Baker’s World War II military service, President Clinton presented him with the nation’s highest decoration for battlefield valor, the Medal of Honor.
Mr. Baker stayed with the Army, lived through its desegregation, and became one of the first blacks to command an all white company. He joined the Airborne along the way and made his last jump at age forty-eight.
After retiring from the Army, he spent nearly twenty years working for the Read Cross. Today, he lives in Northern Idaho with his wife. Heidy.
Journalist Ken Olsen also grew up in Wyoming. He is an award-winning writer from Spokane, Washington Spokesman-Review, which featured his widely hailed series on Vernon Baker. His free-lance work includes essays published in the Left Bank series of literary anthologies produced by blue Heron Publishing Co. He also is the coauthor of a winter guide to Yellowstone National Park. Mr. Olsen, his sweetheart, Samantha, and their faithful dogs live in northern Idaho. --This text refers to the Mass Market Paperback edition.
Mr. Baker fought in Italy, earning a Purple Heart, Bronze Star, and Distinguished Service Cross. He was one of the most highly decorated black soldiers in the Mediterranean Theater. On January 13, 1997, fifty-two years after Mr. Baker’s World War II military service, President Clinton presented him with the nation’s highest decoration for battlefield valor, the Medal of Honor.
Mr. Baker stayed with the Army, lived through its desegregation, and became one of the first blacks to command an all white company. He joined the Airborne along the way and made his last jump at age forty-eight.
After retiring from the Army, he spent nearly twenty years working for the Read Cross. Today, he lives in Northern Idaho with his wife. Heidy.
Journalist Ken Olsen also grew up in Wyoming. He is an award-winning writer from Spokane, Washington Spokesman-Review, which featured his widely hailed series on Vernon Baker. His free-lance work includes essays published in the Left Bank series of literary anthologies produced by blue Heron Publishing Co. He also is the coauthor of a winter guide to Yellowstone National Park. Mr. Olsen, his sweetheart, Samantha, and their faithful dogs live in northern Idaho. --This text refers to the Mass Market Paperback edition.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
PROLOGUE
There is a pain--so utter,
It swallows substance up,
Then covers the Abyss with Trance,
So Memory can step
Around--across--upon it.
--EMILY DICKINSON
I am haunted by the memory of nineteen men; men I left on a ridge in northern Italy five decades ago.
I still hear a German commander scream "Feuer," howitzer shells whistling in, followed by the whish, whish, whish of mortars, the trees around us shredding. Wounded and dying men screaming. My only medic killed by a sniper as we try to withdraw.
A film of burned cordite covers the roof of my mouth and cottons my tongue. It's April 1945 in Italy's Northern Apennine Mountains and my men and I have been trading bullets and grenades with the German Army for so long that the air is more spent powder than oxygen. I know, as soon as this taste bites my tongue, the images will follow.
I gather dog tags from my dead comrades, time after time, figuring their bodies probably never will be recovered, that their families deserve to know where and when they died. I see the living wrestle rifles and ammunition from the dead and mortally wounded, taking from those who have given everything, so the rest of us can live and fight a little longer.
I hear, over and over again, my company commander telling me he is going for reinforcements. I stare long and hard at Captain John F. Runyon as he gives me that story. He trudges away, disappearing forever into the late morning haze, the haze of exploding shells, bodies, and blood. Yet today, I cannot remember a detail from his face, except that it was a white man's face, whiter yet, nearly translucent, with fear.
Blame? Rage? Perhaps. I am angry and aghast that he never returned. But more likely this memory lapse is habit. There was no reason to memorize anything distinguishing about Runyon or any other white commander. A white officer in charge of black troops could ask to be relieved of his command at any time and that wish had to be granted immediately.
The rest of us were black Buffalo Soldiers, regarded as too worthless to lead ourselves. The Army decided we needed supervision from white Southerners, as if war was plantation work and fighting Germans was picking cotton.
Harsh as those words seem, I can't work up much bitterness anymore. Yet, I cannot forget the faces of the men who died beside me, nor can I stop wondering if, as their platoon leader, I am responsible for their deaths.
I am haunted by what I cannot remember. Everywhere I go, people ask me to recite the names of those nineteen men I left in the shadow of Castle Aghinolfi. No doubt studio audiences and readers would be more satisfied if I could give dramatic discourse about how several men, closer to me than brothers, died agonizing but glorious deaths, imbued with heroism that stirs God Bless America in every soul.
I cannot.
I cannot remember the names of the men of my platoon who fought with me and died at the castle or the dozens of other villages and canals, ridge tops and mountain valleys. I only remember bringing back handfuls of dog tags.
I cannot stare down those battles in search of every emotional detail. I now realize the mistakes I made, the recklessness of my bravado, the myth of invincibility that only existed when I was young and naive--which is why we send the young and naive to fight our wars. If I put fifty-two years of knowledge and perspective next to the names and the memories of the men for whom I was responsible I court insanity.
After the first combat death splattered blood across my face I realized there is no glory. I numbed myself in order to go on. I divided my mind into compartments, putting emotion into one, soldiering into another. I lived and worked from the compartment of soldiering. If I made the mistake of getting too close to somebody, I forced myself to forget about it after his face exploded or his intestines spilled. I didn't dare sit and mourn. I had to keep my wits about me or I would end up being carried out on a stretcher or left for the vultures and blowflies.
Fatigue at first disarmed me--making me more vulnerable to grief. Soon fatigue was my friend, helping to deaden my brain and the part of my soul that wanted to well up, overflow, and drown me with grief. Occasionally I could not quell it and ended up heaving my guts out, first with bitter gushes and then racking, dry retches. It felt horrible, not so much for the stomach spasms or bile rushing out of my mouth as for the fact that I was losing control.
I never feared dying. I always feared losing control.
It's not that I don't love these men and mourn their passing. It's not that I don't count the ways I might have prevented their deaths. That's the luxury and the damnation of having the time and opportunity to look back. That's part of the haunting. But gunfire, mortar rounds, artillery shells, and booby traps don't allow any perspective. I focused on the desperate need to survive that moment, capture a few hundred feet of hillside, a trench, a machine gun nest. If I survived one minute, I figured out how to deal with the next.
After years of trying to forget, of regretting many deaths, I have been handed the hero's mantle. I wear it uneasily. People have considerable expectations of heroes. We are not to falter in the spotlight; we are not to have made many mistakes in the past. Being a black American raises the ante.
"Black youth so desperately need heroes such as yourself," well-wishers constantly tell me, as if this is the ultimate compliment. It is not. It is the ultimate pressure to constantly re-examine memories long buried in emotional self-defense. It magnifies my shortcomings and my guilt.
I did not seek this final chapter to my life. I moved to a remote cabin in the backwoods of Idaho, with easy access only to good elk hunting, to escape attention. The Army came looking for me as part of its own self-examination. Its historians created this heroic image, and the media happily made additions. The public added another measure.
Once handed mythical stature, I have not been allowed to step out of the spotlight. Even if the mantle fits me as sloppily as a father's shirt fits his infant son, I am expected to stroll about my stage as if my outfit was tailor-made. If I ask for something more my size, I will be cast as ungrateful. And with enough hype, media attention, time as a poster boy for this cause or that, I have magically grown into the shirt, this stature. At least in the eyes of the public.
I am not an icon for any ideal. I am an old soldier, a loner, a man more fit to fight wars than deal with peacetime society. My mistakes are as numerous as any man's. My regrets likely loom larger.
My hero's mantle has been crafted out of carnage, the senseless sacrifice of young men and my mad-dog desperation to outlast the enemy and disprove the fiction that black soldiers were afraid to fight. It is not cause for national celebration nor the incarnation of heroes. It is reason for us to mourn our losses and question our motivations.
I love those nineteen men like no other souls. I cannot give their names, but I carry their faces in my mind with nagging clarity. They visit me in the night, or when I'm sitting on a downed tree awaiting an elk. Or when some other small event triggers a memory of what we shared. The faces say nothing. They only stare at me with the final look they gave death.
These men, these faces, are the reason I am here today, the reason I was selected for the Medal of Honor. They are the heroes.
ONE
All that troubles is but for a moment. That only
is important which is eternal.
--Inscription in Milan Cathedral
Summer 1944, Northern Italy
The August air was Louisiana thick and heavy as we picked our way across the Arno River on the remains of a bridge demolished by the retreating Germans. The jagged shards of concrete rose and dove in the muddy channel as if they were razorback tombstones rather than a passageway. This awkward jumble was the only option. We were in too much of a hurry to wait for the engineering corps to pull together a pontoon bridge. The river was all that stood between us and our crack at the shooting war.
The Arno runs at a pleasantly slow pace from the mountains of north central Italy, through Florence, down to Pisa and on west to the Ligurian Sea. It traverses cultivated fields, grape arbors, and the ever-present olive groves that stood sentry even when legions from the Byzantine era fought Germanic warriors here 1,500 years earlier. The chocolate water added one more stirring contrast to the collage of hazy blue mountains, deep-green fields, dusky trees, and glassy, aqua ocean.
The wrecked bridge was a regular element of the German's insurance policy--delay or divert us as long as possible--often taken to hideous extremes. The Ponte Vecchio in Florence, an ancient, stunning structure that is part art, part bridge, survived only because a German commander defied Hitler's orders to destroy everything as his troops pulled out. No telling what Der Führer planned for Michelangelo's works.
Standing within squinting distance of the leaning tower of Pisa, our company--Charlie Company--proudly led the 370th Infantry Regiment as it traversed the obstacle course over the Arno. Much of what remained of the bridge was submerged, making the crossing more swim than hike. Sergeant Willie Dickens, the diminutive company comic, ended up neck-deep in water, leaving visible only his head, his rigidly upthrust arms, and the submachine gun he was trying to keep dry. He reminded me of a cartoonish prairie dog who had just popped out of a burrow, holding its front paws high as if surrendering to the sheriff.
Dickens was from North Carolina or Mississippi, the way I remember it. He was the youngest of a large family that had subsisted with a team of mules on forty acres so pathetic that no white man cared that they were black folk with property. There hadn'... --This text refers to the Mass Market Paperback edition.
There is a pain--so utter,
It swallows substance up,
Then covers the Abyss with Trance,
So Memory can step
Around--across--upon it.
--EMILY DICKINSON
I am haunted by the memory of nineteen men; men I left on a ridge in northern Italy five decades ago.
I still hear a German commander scream "Feuer," howitzer shells whistling in, followed by the whish, whish, whish of mortars, the trees around us shredding. Wounded and dying men screaming. My only medic killed by a sniper as we try to withdraw.
A film of burned cordite covers the roof of my mouth and cottons my tongue. It's April 1945 in Italy's Northern Apennine Mountains and my men and I have been trading bullets and grenades with the German Army for so long that the air is more spent powder than oxygen. I know, as soon as this taste bites my tongue, the images will follow.
I gather dog tags from my dead comrades, time after time, figuring their bodies probably never will be recovered, that their families deserve to know where and when they died. I see the living wrestle rifles and ammunition from the dead and mortally wounded, taking from those who have given everything, so the rest of us can live and fight a little longer.
I hear, over and over again, my company commander telling me he is going for reinforcements. I stare long and hard at Captain John F. Runyon as he gives me that story. He trudges away, disappearing forever into the late morning haze, the haze of exploding shells, bodies, and blood. Yet today, I cannot remember a detail from his face, except that it was a white man's face, whiter yet, nearly translucent, with fear.
Blame? Rage? Perhaps. I am angry and aghast that he never returned. But more likely this memory lapse is habit. There was no reason to memorize anything distinguishing about Runyon or any other white commander. A white officer in charge of black troops could ask to be relieved of his command at any time and that wish had to be granted immediately.
The rest of us were black Buffalo Soldiers, regarded as too worthless to lead ourselves. The Army decided we needed supervision from white Southerners, as if war was plantation work and fighting Germans was picking cotton.
Harsh as those words seem, I can't work up much bitterness anymore. Yet, I cannot forget the faces of the men who died beside me, nor can I stop wondering if, as their platoon leader, I am responsible for their deaths.
I am haunted by what I cannot remember. Everywhere I go, people ask me to recite the names of those nineteen men I left in the shadow of Castle Aghinolfi. No doubt studio audiences and readers would be more satisfied if I could give dramatic discourse about how several men, closer to me than brothers, died agonizing but glorious deaths, imbued with heroism that stirs God Bless America in every soul.
I cannot.
I cannot remember the names of the men of my platoon who fought with me and died at the castle or the dozens of other villages and canals, ridge tops and mountain valleys. I only remember bringing back handfuls of dog tags.
I cannot stare down those battles in search of every emotional detail. I now realize the mistakes I made, the recklessness of my bravado, the myth of invincibility that only existed when I was young and naive--which is why we send the young and naive to fight our wars. If I put fifty-two years of knowledge and perspective next to the names and the memories of the men for whom I was responsible I court insanity.
After the first combat death splattered blood across my face I realized there is no glory. I numbed myself in order to go on. I divided my mind into compartments, putting emotion into one, soldiering into another. I lived and worked from the compartment of soldiering. If I made the mistake of getting too close to somebody, I forced myself to forget about it after his face exploded or his intestines spilled. I didn't dare sit and mourn. I had to keep my wits about me or I would end up being carried out on a stretcher or left for the vultures and blowflies.
Fatigue at first disarmed me--making me more vulnerable to grief. Soon fatigue was my friend, helping to deaden my brain and the part of my soul that wanted to well up, overflow, and drown me with grief. Occasionally I could not quell it and ended up heaving my guts out, first with bitter gushes and then racking, dry retches. It felt horrible, not so much for the stomach spasms or bile rushing out of my mouth as for the fact that I was losing control.
I never feared dying. I always feared losing control.
It's not that I don't love these men and mourn their passing. It's not that I don't count the ways I might have prevented their deaths. That's the luxury and the damnation of having the time and opportunity to look back. That's part of the haunting. But gunfire, mortar rounds, artillery shells, and booby traps don't allow any perspective. I focused on the desperate need to survive that moment, capture a few hundred feet of hillside, a trench, a machine gun nest. If I survived one minute, I figured out how to deal with the next.
After years of trying to forget, of regretting many deaths, I have been handed the hero's mantle. I wear it uneasily. People have considerable expectations of heroes. We are not to falter in the spotlight; we are not to have made many mistakes in the past. Being a black American raises the ante.
"Black youth so desperately need heroes such as yourself," well-wishers constantly tell me, as if this is the ultimate compliment. It is not. It is the ultimate pressure to constantly re-examine memories long buried in emotional self-defense. It magnifies my shortcomings and my guilt.
I did not seek this final chapter to my life. I moved to a remote cabin in the backwoods of Idaho, with easy access only to good elk hunting, to escape attention. The Army came looking for me as part of its own self-examination. Its historians created this heroic image, and the media happily made additions. The public added another measure.
Once handed mythical stature, I have not been allowed to step out of the spotlight. Even if the mantle fits me as sloppily as a father's shirt fits his infant son, I am expected to stroll about my stage as if my outfit was tailor-made. If I ask for something more my size, I will be cast as ungrateful. And with enough hype, media attention, time as a poster boy for this cause or that, I have magically grown into the shirt, this stature. At least in the eyes of the public.
I am not an icon for any ideal. I am an old soldier, a loner, a man more fit to fight wars than deal with peacetime society. My mistakes are as numerous as any man's. My regrets likely loom larger.
My hero's mantle has been crafted out of carnage, the senseless sacrifice of young men and my mad-dog desperation to outlast the enemy and disprove the fiction that black soldiers were afraid to fight. It is not cause for national celebration nor the incarnation of heroes. It is reason for us to mourn our losses and question our motivations.
I love those nineteen men like no other souls. I cannot give their names, but I carry their faces in my mind with nagging clarity. They visit me in the night, or when I'm sitting on a downed tree awaiting an elk. Or when some other small event triggers a memory of what we shared. The faces say nothing. They only stare at me with the final look they gave death.
These men, these faces, are the reason I am here today, the reason I was selected for the Medal of Honor. They are the heroes.
ONE
All that troubles is but for a moment. That only
is important which is eternal.
--Inscription in Milan Cathedral
Summer 1944, Northern Italy
The August air was Louisiana thick and heavy as we picked our way across the Arno River on the remains of a bridge demolished by the retreating Germans. The jagged shards of concrete rose and dove in the muddy channel as if they were razorback tombstones rather than a passageway. This awkward jumble was the only option. We were in too much of a hurry to wait for the engineering corps to pull together a pontoon bridge. The river was all that stood between us and our crack at the shooting war.
The Arno runs at a pleasantly slow pace from the mountains of north central Italy, through Florence, down to Pisa and on west to the Ligurian Sea. It traverses cultivated fields, grape arbors, and the ever-present olive groves that stood sentry even when legions from the Byzantine era fought Germanic warriors here 1,500 years earlier. The chocolate water added one more stirring contrast to the collage of hazy blue mountains, deep-green fields, dusky trees, and glassy, aqua ocean.
The wrecked bridge was a regular element of the German's insurance policy--delay or divert us as long as possible--often taken to hideous extremes. The Ponte Vecchio in Florence, an ancient, stunning structure that is part art, part bridge, survived only because a German commander defied Hitler's orders to destroy everything as his troops pulled out. No telling what Der Führer planned for Michelangelo's works.
Standing within squinting distance of the leaning tower of Pisa, our company--Charlie Company--proudly led the 370th Infantry Regiment as it traversed the obstacle course over the Arno. Much of what remained of the bridge was submerged, making the crossing more swim than hike. Sergeant Willie Dickens, the diminutive company comic, ended up neck-deep in water, leaving visible only his head, his rigidly upthrust arms, and the submachine gun he was trying to keep dry. He reminded me of a cartoonish prairie dog who had just popped out of a burrow, holding its front paws high as if surrendering to the sheriff.
Dickens was from North Carolina or Mississippi, the way I remember it. He was the youngest of a large family that had subsisted with a team of mules on forty acres so pathetic that no white man cared that they were black folk with property. There hadn'... --This text refers to the Mass Market Paperback edition.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
It's Not What Happens to You: It's What You Do With It,
By
This review is from: Lasting Valor (Hardcover)
I purchased this book to tap into the life lessons of another black leader.And I really gained more than I expected. Vernon Baker talks about race, and how being Black during WWII, while in the army also meant having to work harder to prove yourself than his white commanders had to. While these racial problems still exist everywhere, and everyday, on many levels, the difference is that Baker's behind, and everyone one of his troop's behind was on the line, just because they had to make a difference in times when their white leaders used them to cover up the fact that they were cowards. To be in, and part of the team, if you will, they had to be braver than their cowardly commanders who really didn't want them there. Another interesting point in this story is, "The American Army mostly ignored its black combat troops along the Western Front while the French hailed their valor and awarded the Cross of War, to every member of three all-black regiments. Most American history books fail to record any of this, and the Army certainly didn't bring it up." "Lasting Valor," he gives details that weaving WWII battles, his Wyoming upbringing, and the women who came into his life (his traditionally thinking male identity), into one story that will touch everyone's heart. Also, this book ends in a message similar to Herman Wouk's message, from "War and Remembrance," when it states, "War, however, is the most regrettable proving ground. For the sake of my nineteen comrades, I hope no man, black, white, or any color, ever again has the opportunity to earn the Medal of Honor. War is not honor. Those who rush to launch conflict, and those who seek to create heroes from it, should remember war's legacy. You have to be there to appreciate its horrors. And die to forget them." I'd love to see this book become required reading for high school students, throughout America.
12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Lasting Valor had a profound influence on me,
By
This review is from: Lasting Valor (Mass Market Paperback)
I love this book and had a hard time putting it down. At first it was just a little slow, but quickly picked up its pace. It is so vividly written that, though I am white, I felt Baker's experiences along with him. I felt the sting of anger when a bus driver told him to get to the back of the bus and when the colonel told him to take off the DSC ribbon. I felt his anguish at leaving the Italian woman in Italy, and the joy he derived from his children. This book deserves to be a best seller.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Takes courage to put this book down - a must read.,
By A Customer
This review is from: Lasting Valor (Hardcover)
Okay, so I originally bought "Lasting Valor" to put on my coffee table in the hopes I would seem more interesting to visitors and perhaps just a wee bit erudite too. But then I read it (as you must) and realized, damn, this book is GREAT. Written in the first person by World War II military veteran Vernon Baker (with journalist Ken Olsen and a superb foreward by General Colin Powell)), this is a tale of how it was to be black in an army that, while it hated you, needed you as cannon fodder. Part of this saga came to light last year when Baker was belatedly given the U.S Medal of Honor for his previously ignored acts of heroism. But the full irony of this "recognition" - more an empty apology that comes far too late for the nineteen men that Baker saw die on a ridge in Northern Italy - can only be understood when you read this book, not the short, simplified newspaper articles. I am neither a military buff nor particularly a fan of memoirs, but I could not put down this book - which is clearly meant for everyone - black, white, young, old, democrat, republican. Most gripping is the tale of betrayal by white commanders who left (yes, literally walked away from) Baker and his men when the battle got too intense ("I still hear a German commander scream Feuer, howitzer shells whistling in, followed by the whish, whish, whish of mortars, the trees around us shredding....") and then the maddeningly smooth cover-up of that cowardice by the army. There is a wry edge to Baker's voice that hovers somewhere between wise and bitter and this only makes the book more interesting - for all those who think that a nice shiny medal can absolve the injustice and the horror, Baker asks you to think again.
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