When she died at 95, Bessie Kysela was still getting down on her hands and knees to dust the baseboards of her two-flat on South Homan Avenue. She was uncomplaining, unsentimental and resigned to exile. Coming to America wasn’t her idea. That was her husband Frank’s doing, and in her quiet way Bessie always resisted it. After seven decades in Chicago, she spoke no English.
Mostly, though, she followed her husband’s lead. Her life revolved around washing floors, putting up and taking down the summer and winter curtains, and having dinner ready when Frank came home from his butcher shop.
Yet maybe she did get a glimpse of the age-old dream of the immigrant when their son Frankie went to Farragut High School. In their Czech village, education was an unaffordable luxury.
Long after her husband passed on, Bessie maintained her daily housekeeping routine, breaking it only once a year: Dec. 23, the anniversary of Frankie’s death in the Battle of the Bulge in 1944.
She allowed herself the luxury of a daylong cry.
When nations prepare for war, like the one President Bush says we might have to fight with Iraq, diplomats assess the international situation. Calculating the balance of forces, generals and admirals add up infantry divisions and aircraft carriers.
But does anyone count the Bessie Kyselas?
Our think tanks and war colleges are staffed by far-seeing military and strategic analysts. They spin scenarios of what the world might look like on the morrow of a future war. Can their mind’s eye also look backward to picture how Bessie inevitably spent the day before Christmas Eve?
She cried so softly you’d scarcely hear from a few feet away. She would sit in an old kitchen chair by the living room window. Other days, she’d take an afternoon break there, observing life on the street below. But on Dec. 23, her bloodshot eyes could see only her front porch and those dozen stairs that an Army officer once climbed bearing a fateful telegram.
Some of war’s devastation can be repaired, sometimes rather quickly. Within a few years of Germany’s and Japan’s defeat in World War II, their cities had been rebuilt, their economies were flourishing. The same could prove true of Iraq, should we take on Saddam Hussein.
But war’s human toll can be indelible. The pain can go on, although diminished, for generations.
When Bessie died, her niece, with whom I share my life, sorted through her personal effects. Among them was that telegram from the War Department and Frankie’s Army dress cap. They sit in a cardboard carton on our closet shelf, surfacing whenever we move or do a spring cleaning.
When they do, it is striking how new that cap still looks, unsoiled and with scarcely a thread out of place. Except that its plastic rain covering has clouded, it could be reissued to a present-day GI.
Frankie barely got a chance to wear it.
When they graduated in the spring of 1944, Frankie and a high school buddy tried signing up for the Army Air Corps. To many American kids, flying seemed the height of glamor. But the army then didn’t so much need pilots. The long-awaited invasion of Europe had just begun, and anyone who could carry a rifle was being pressed into duty as an infantryman.
After basic training, Frankie came home on leave, wearing that Army cap. Then he set aside his dress uniform for battlefield fatigues. He was assigned to the 26th Infantry Division, which fought a set of bloody battles in eastern France that fall. So severe were the casualties that the division was pulled out of the line in December and given a month off to train the green replacements assigned it.
Yet no sooner were they written, than those orders had to be canceled–because of a development military planners hadn’t anticipated.
When the first snows began to fall, the generals figured that the Nazis had been beaten. Optimists were predicting that the war could be over by Christmas. What they didn’t know was that Adolf Hitler secretly had been hoarding some of his divisions for a last battle, hoping to land a final-round knockout punch.
He almost did. German forces broke through the Allies’ formations, creating a huge bulge in their lines that lent its name to the battle. In the emergency, all available units were rushed to the front, including the 26th Infantry Division. Racing from its training grounds, it reached the battlefield on the 22nd of December.
The next day, Frankie Kysela was killed in action near Buschrodt, a tiny village in Luxembourg. He was 19.
Bessie was 44, which meant that she was to have half a century to mark the anniversary of his death with her tears.
History clearly shows some wars are unavoidable, that sometimes it is better to get on with the fighting sooner than later. Perhaps World War II would have left fewer childless mothers, orphans and widows, if the British and French had stopped Hitler before he built the Nazi war machine, if we similarly had challenged Japan before Pearl Harbor.
But it is also true that things that once seemed clear-cut can afterward look less so. In the 1960s, Americans were told that if the communists weren’t stopped in the jungles of Southeast Asia, we’d wind up having to fight them on our own West Coast. Yet Vietnam still has a communist government, with whom we now have diplomatic relations. With the full blessing of the State Department, American corporations are looking to do business there.
Without a doubt, Hussein is little short of the very incarnation of evil. Nothing in his record inspires confidence in his offer to readmit UN arms inspectors. The horrors he has wreaked on his own people make it clear what he would do to us, should he have the chance. So the question of what to do about him isn’t a moral issue.
It is a tactical one. It can be broken down into its logical components: How soon is he likely to have weapons of mass destruction? In what circumstances would he use them, and against whom? If we don’t stop him now, what additional handicap will we carry if we have to fight him down the road?
Against each of those questions, military planners can set down numbers representing the resources required, the probable expenditures. The likely casualty rates can be calculated for alternative military strategies. But one cost is much harder to determine. There is no algorithm for the long suffering produced by even the most just, the most necessary of wars.
That requires an act of imagination.
Visualize an old lady softly sobbing as she looked out a window on South Homan Avenue. Fifty years afterward, she could still see an Army officer bearing a telegram trying to express the inexpressible: “the deepest regrets of the Secretary of War that your son was killed in action.”
