A lot of guys want to forget World War II, but not Bob Enkelmann—he wants to relive it again and again. So what does he have left if he can’t do that? What happens to a soldier without war?
By Matthew Halverson
Photograph by Mark Gilliland
“Did I tell you about the time I was almost killed?”
Bob Enkelmann knows how to tell a story, which is a good thing because he likes to tell stories. Actually, no—he doesn’t like to tell stories, he lives to tell stories. A couple of years into his ninth decade, he has, naturally, a lifetime’s worth of yarns to spin, but he likes to tell the ones about World War II the most, and they more or less fall into three categories: Bob and his fellow recruits goofing off during basic training at Camp Swift in Texas; Bob and the other soldiers from the 102nd Infantry Division getting into trouble in the woods of Holland as they marched to Germany’s Roer River; Bob watching artillery explosions toss his band of brothers around the Rhineland like rag dolls.
He starts them all by saying, “That’s another thing,” as if one memory is stitched to the next; keep tugging the twine of recollection, and those little anecdotes have no choice but to slip out one after another. And he ends them all—even the one about Everett Erb, who made it out of a mortar barrage only to have fate catch up to him a couple of weeks later, courtesy of an artillery shell—with a chuckle. Laughing at death’s twisted sense of humor was the only way to keep from going crazy in his foxhole, and, well, there’s no sense crying about it now.
The problem is, he’s running out of people to regale with his tales from the battlefield. Even at 82, he’s one of the youngest surviving Ozarks (as the members of the 102nd are known), and his wife, Irene, has heard his stories so many times she could probably tell them herself. Just about the only chance he has to laugh about his first morning in Europe, when he woke up expecting a hot breakfast and got a can of lukewarm Vienna sausages instead; the only time he gets to laugh about cheating death; the only opportunity he gets to liberate Holland all over again is when the 102nd has its annual reunion. So even though it’s getting a little tougher for him to get around these days, when the president of the division’s reunion association called from Dallas and asked Bob to help organize this year’s event here in St. Louis, he got on it, booking the hotel rooms and organizing tours of the Arch and making sure that “libations will flow freely in the hospitality room.”
What he did not do was accept that responsibility because of the chance that this might be one of the 102nd’s last reunions. He’s just not prepared to believe that the other guys from the 102nd would vote to dissolve the association. Nope—not yet. For one thing, they’ve still got tens of thousands of dollars in the college scholarship program; if they dissolve now, what’s going to happen to all of that money? Not to mention the fact that there’s still a lot of really good kids they could help out.
But even more than that, there are still a lot of stories to be told. Another guy from the division seems to pass away every week these days, sure, but plenty of them are still around, so why shouldn’t they keep getting together? Bob will keep going till he dies; he’s still breathing, and so are the other 150 guys who will probably show up this August. Heck, little Bobby Smith had a heart attack at the reunion in Kansas City in 2001, and he left the hospital the next day without checking out because he’d be damned if he was going to miss the big Friday night dinner. So yeah, it’s just too soon to call it quits.
And that note that the association’s president posted on the division’s website, the one that said this “may well be the last hurrah for many of us to see old comrades”—well, it rang a pretty ominous bell for Bob, but it’s a little premature. There are still a lot of stories to tell.
Bob had trouble adjusting to civilian life once he got back to the States after the war, but for him, trying to forget the sound of those German planes putt-putting overhead or the acrid smell of spent mortar shells wasn’t the problem. Trying to hold onto those memories was. He wanted to remember. He’d taken fire and earned the Bronze Star. He’d helped liberate Holland. He’d gotten a job in the 102nd’s Counter Intelligence Corp detachment and helped round up rogue members of the Third Reich.
And then nothing.
“You’re living minute to minute, wondering if a sniper is going to put a shot in your head,” he says. “Then suddenly, the war ends, and then you really get the creeps. You can’t wear a pistol anymore. You’re thinking, ‘How the hell could this be over?’”
He had a chance to go back to Europe and hunt for Nazis again, but then his dad got sick and he didn’t want to leave his mother alone. He took a discharge, and that was it.
He got a job at Union Electric, and the first weeks were the worst; for a guy like Bob, who’d learned the difference between the sounds of incoming and outgoing artillery fire, listening to condescending supervisors drone on at training sessions was worse than any strafing he’d ever endured. “I’d been king of the hill,” he says now. “I had more power than the president of the United States, both houses of Congress and the Supreme Court. I could throw you in jail without asking any questions. And now I’m just a trainee at Union Electric. It really got to me.”
He learned to endure the inconsequential yammering of co-workers either too old or too oblivious to understand what he’d accomplished, what he’d lost. He found an opening in life’s traffic and merged with the flow. He married Irene, whom he’d loved since before he was drafted and sent to Texas for basic training, and they had two girls and two boys. He loved them all—but they hadn’t been over there with him. He could tell them about the day before he went to the front lines and the first sergeant told him to write a letter home because it might be his last, but to Irene and the kids it was just a story from the war, with a beginning, a middle and an end. It’s not like they could relate to the fact that that story was attached to other stories that didn’t have beginnings and middles and ends, but instead ran right into each other and added up to a nine-month head trip of grief and apprehension and relief and elation.
Of course they loved him and looked at him the way anyone looks at a good husband and father, but they didn’t look at him the way the people in those little towns in Holland did when he and his buddies ran off the Nazis. They couldn’t possibly look at him the way that little girl did when she asked Bob and a few of the guys from the 102nd for a piece of chocolate and then invited them to her home for dinner—that’s a completely different kind of love. To those people, he was a hero, more than any high school quarterback or firefighter who pulled a cat out of a tree, and for damn sure more than he’d ever be as an engineer at Union Electric.
He needed to talk to someone else who’d left a piece of himself behind, who’d slept in the mud and eaten cold Vienna sausages for breakfast, who’d seen another guy die holding his own guts. Because when you live that stuff, it cuts you open and crawls inside. It sticks around.
“You’ve seen Band of Brothers?” he asks, trying to explain the connection he still has with the other guys from the 102nd. “That’s the way we feel. We lived under the worst conditions imaginable for nine months, so everybody has a bond. It’s different than belonging to a club. It’s ingrained in you.”
The same year Bob was coping with the postwar numbness of civilian life, members of the 102nd met in Philadelphia to swap stories for the first time. They held their second get-together in 1950, right here in St. Louis. He never had a clue.
But 30 years later, in 1979, out of the clear blue he got a letter in the mail, telling him that the 102nd Infantry Division would be holding its next reunion in Nashville.
Irene’s nephew was getting married in Florida that same weekend, and she had to go to that, so she was out. But not Bob. Nope. He was going to Tennessee. He packed his bags, and he got on a plane. He landed in Nashville and went straight for the hotel.
When he got there, General William Douglas greeted him and offered him tickets to the Grand Ole Opry, but Bob didn’t want to listen to music. He wanted to talk. The 102nd had been getting together for 30 years, dammit, so he had some lost time to make up for. Where could he find the guy who organized this thing? He wanted to know more about it. Douglas told Bob to look for Aaron Schirtzinger in the hospitality suite. He did, and he found him, and Bob just started talking. He kept Aaron there until 3 in the morning.
That whole weekend was like going back without actually going back. He didn’t need to be on that bridge over the Roer River, because the other guys had been there, too—maybe not at the exact same moment or on the exact same spot Bob had been, but they’d been there. So when he told his stories, he didn’t need to waste time with details, because they could fill in the gaps on their own. They were all the context and background he needed. And when he’d get to the end of one of his threads, someone else just started another.
They laughed about the time when what’s-his-name won a Silver Star and took a two-day furlough in Paris and skipped the ceremony where that general was going to pin the medal on his chest. And then they talked about the dead, and it was OK to remember the buddies they’d lost and the rough shit they’d seen because if they pushed that all away, then they really were abandoning those kids who died and got left behind. Who would have remembered Bob if he had ended up in one of those graves?
“The hardest thing is when I go to [the World War II Netherlands American Cemetery and Memorial] and see all of those white crosses and see all of those guys lying there, 18 or 19 years old,” he says, his voice getting quiet. “I was able to come back and have a life, and they’ve been buried there all this time.”
He’s been to every reunion since, except the one in 1987, when he had kidney stones and his doctor pleaded with him to stay home.
There are those guys who don’t want to remember the good stuff or the bad stuff. They did their time, they made their contribution, and they came home. And that’s OK. Bob still emails Aaron Kianofsky, who was in the CIC with him, but Aaron doesn’t go to the reunions. Never has. He doesn’t want to talk about the past. Looking back is just another way of not moving forward. “I’m very pragmatic, and I’m more or less living in this world,” he says. “I don’t see any particular benefit in recounting the war stories.”
But see, for Bob, when he recounts a war story with the guys from the 102nd, he’s not just talking about dates and places and beginnings and middles and ends. He’s keeping something inside himself alive. “You pick up a history book and read about World War II, that’s us—we were there,” he says. “We don’t need to read a damn
history book.”
So if the guys in Houston or Cincinnati want to host another reunion next year or the year after that, why shouldn’t they be able to? What’s the rush to dissolve things? There’s still time. People will still come.
Last fall, Bob came home from dinner to find the history of the 102nd on his doorstep. A couple of years ago, John Emerich, the division’s historian, died, and then just after last year’s reunion, Emerich’s wife, Hope, died, too. They’d been bringing all of the books and pictures and memorabilia from the 102nd to the reunions for years, so when a couple of guys from the division went to help clean out the Emeriches’ condo, they packed up all of that history and had it shipped to Bob’s house so he could bring it to this year’s reunion. And boy was he mad when he found it on his porch. “I volunteered to take care of the reunion,” he told the other guys, “but I ain’t taking care of all of that!”
That pallet of boxes has been sitting in his basement for months, but he hasn’t touched it. Why bother? A couple of the other guys are going to take it to the hotel in Westport and set it up for this reunion, and then they’ll pack it up again and send it off to the U.S. Army Military History Institute in Pennsylvania, where it will stay. Even if there is another reunion next year, the history won’t be there.
That’s OK. Bob doesn’t need it. Those books and pictures don’t really tell you what happened over there in the winter of 1943 and spring of 1944 anyway. Books are for tallying the dead and patting generals on the back. Words on a page can’t tell anyone how strange it feels to mourn a guy who died right next to you and still be glad it was him and not you—and they sure as hell can’t tell anyone what it’s like to see a building erupt in a ball of fire and realize that it was just dumb luck you got pulled out of it for kitchen patrol two minutes earlier.
He just needs those other guys. Because when they’re gone, and there’s no one left to make all the close calls and the little victories real, then what?
