By Corinne Giacobbe
When you think of sheltering in wartime you might think of foxholes, but my father experienced protection on D-Day in World War II from an unseen yet powerful presence. My father received a Bronze Star for the courage he displayed on the battlefield, but it was the grace delivered from the wings of spirit that saved many lives that fateful day.
My father did not seem religious. Years after the war, I found out he didn’t like going to church because of physical discomfort. The pews were hard, the benches not padded, standing then sitting…all this inflamed old intestinal war injuries.
Just before he passed away, after three years of dealing with worsening colon issues, and during hectic years of graduate studies for me, he asked me to visit one afternoon. I stood by his bed as he whispered that he wanted to share something about the war.
I was quite surprised. He had never detailed his military experiences, although he relished telling tales about hijinks, on base and off, with his beloved army buddies. Recalling events was a sacred ritual at the annual Army Reunion picnic for the families celebrating those survivors from his division.
Now my father wanted to tell me about a war experience that changed his life forever. He told me he had scoured his American veteran magazines, hoping for relevant battlefield testimony, corroborating what he had experienced. Nothing surfaced. He did not know I was studying A Course in Miracles and the deeper spiritual life it gave me. He merely said that lately, he just felt instinctively that I would be open to hearing what he had experienced.
He recalled that at Fort Bragg in North Carolina during his training, he was the jokester with a talent for making bad puns funny, and with mirth and mischief, always up for a gag. At that time there was one of the most popular and dazzling movie stars, a matinee idol named Cary Grant. And his buddies thought my father looked like him.
As a gag my father agreed to mimic the flirty beach pose of big band singer-dancer, Betty Grable. His soldier friends hoisted him horizontally, as he lay stretched out, one hand behind his head provocatively. The pose became a poster and attracted starstruck girls in droves to dance with the soldiers. That was the fun side of my father’s military experience. The terrible part was just ahead.
June 10th, 1944. It was termed D-Day Plus Four. It was supposed to be a back-up operation with lighter attacks in between the difficult job of retrieving bodies and cleaning up war debris. Heavy, ongoing battle was not expected, he said. Such remaining fierce persistence by the enemy was not supposed to happen.
My father told me that their caring, beloved “G.I. General” hero, General Omar Bradley, reportedly said later, that D-Day week was the bloodiest warfare he had ever encountered.
Stepping over a fallen friend or foe, my father had a sudden shocking realization: “These are my brothers, all are my brothers, this one here we call enemy, but he could be my cousin.” A deep but brief feeling of love arose in my father.
At one point in the storm of fire and debris, contact was lost with headquarters. The location of the Allied soldiers fighting there could not be tracked. That meant medical help, and armed reinforcement would not get through to the battlefield. After the serious delay ended, radio contact was re-established.
My father, a staff sergeant, was assigned a crucial duty: during battle he was to stand next to his superior officer as new waves of Axis reinforcements rushed forward.
To his respected leader, who was also a friend, my father began relaying coordinates he had memorized, and his superior repeated the vital statistics into the radio he held so that headquarters would learn their location.
My father said in halting words to me, “Something…something happened.”
While revealing coordinates my father went speechless. His mind went blank as he witnessed the horrifying explosion that blew his beloved friend’s head off. The radio was tossed upwards, and my father was knocked backwards by the explosion.
At that point, another “something” happened.” My father felt an immediate deep calm, a freedom from the chaos. He felt intense love for everyone on that battlefield. He felt the Holy Spirit embracing him. Everyone was safe. He just knew this dreadful scene was merely a stage-play. He shared with me his “knowing.” “These truly are my brothers. All is well.”
He was strengthened now. He knew–just knew–in that fury of continuing hellish blasts exactly where the radio would be, and that it would be intact. He grabbed it and got to his feet. Straddled over his friend’s remains, bullets flying, but not hitting him, he was noticing calmly “as if at the local cinema” the dark dance of distant Axis troops rhythmically approaching. Unharmed, he repeated the necessary information into the radio. This successful action ended up preventing the loss of countless lives by getting help to the wounded, whomever they were, whatever flag they represented.
Later he was awarded The Bronze Star, Category Heroic Valor. He commented to me that he felt he really should not take credit. In the explosion, inexplicably, everything abruptly cut off. Sound vanished. For a moment battle action froze then re-started in slow motion, allowing him time to operate the radio. He unhurriedly and precisely completed the role he had been given to impart critical communication. It seemed to him as if something else, something like a Presence, was performing the deed.
My father finished this amazing story with a cheery, “And…somehow…at some point… I made it home.” Ever since then, the sacredness of the text of A Course in Miracles began intensifying for me.
Fifteen years later, after his passing, I was jolted awake in the middle of the night by a visitation, from my father. He looked happy, healthy, and was wearing the same clothing he had worn on his final trip to the hospital. It was as though time disappeared–as if fifteen years were merely fifteen micro-seconds from the last time we were together.
He placed the palms of his hands, a pleasant warmth to them, on my cheeks. Love just poured out of him from his glistening eyes. He simply said, “Thank you—for listening.”
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For all the hurt that war has sought to bring—the broken bodies and the shattered limbs, the screaming dying and the silent dead—are gently lifted up and comforted…And nothing more than just one instant of your love without attack is necessary that all this occur. [CE T-27.VI.3:4-6]
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