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When my sister and I were very young, our mother taught us history and politics. She spoke little of her considerable suffering in the Great Depression; instead she described the unregulated market booms of the 1920s, the tragedy of uninsured savings, and how Franklin Roosevelt did the country a lot of good even though he was a Democrat.
She relished telling us about World War II. Over the years she described her generation's war with a strong sense of God's intervention and fervent patriotism, with one exception—the fire bombing of Dresden. At Dresden, she said, we had acted like our enemies and this was wrong.
When I was four, my mother's stepfather, Bernard, stayed with us for a couple weeks to help with some home repairs. Grandpa Bernard was medium in just about everything except for what a boy cares about: he fought in World War II and he drove a road grader in the mountains of Idaho. He was Grandma's second husband and considerably younger than she. My mother spoke reverently of Bernard's bravery in war, without details.
Thrilled to have a soldier in the house, I followed him around holding utensils like spoons and pencils making gun noises. If he dropped a screwdriver I picked it up and shot the enemy. (A child with vivid imaginary friends conjures enemy soldiers who really must be fought.) Best of all: his electric drill. When he laid it down, I picked it up and pulled the trigger. The gyroscopic vibrations, the hypnotically spinning drill, and the weapon-like masculine noises overwhelmed my little system with a tool-induced dopamine rush.
When I wasn't shooting people, I was asking Grandpa Bernard about shooting people. He never answered. As a youngster accustomed to receiving serious answers from adults, I didn't let his cold shoulder deter me.
When I finally drove him over the edge, he became quite cross with me.
I ran to my mother to tattle, but I received a rebuke that people who fought in wars had seen bad things that they didn't want to talk about, so I needed to leave him alone. The gun noises, she said, reminded him of battle so I must stop that, too. His cross and her correction impressed me permanently that war wounds the victors as well as the losers.
February 13, 1995. Curled-edged black and white pictures of his squadron and their B-17s lay strewn over the coffee table and couch pillows along with spiral bound mission diaries, assorted official papers, and a small wedding picture. Vic's weatherbeaten face melted into his hands. Vic was a member of my church.
"I deeply regret participating in the mission over Dresden," he said, speaking between his hands. "We all hated Hitler, and we had a job to do and we did it pretty d—- well, but we shouldn't have destroyed Dresden. There was no reason for it. It was revenge, but that's not what we were fighting for. It was wrong."
I offered to pray for him, which he accepted. After my amen and before we lifted our heads, Vic broke into prayer and asked God to forgive him for his part in the mission. He was a lead bombardier. He sighted in the targets and dropped the bombs.
On February 13, 1945, 873 Royal Air Force bombers dropped 1,500 tons of explosives and 1,200 tons of incendiaries on Dresden, Germany. On February 14, 1945, the Americans sent 311 B-17 bombers to finish the city off. They turned the city into a firestorm visible for 200 miles. A column of 1,000-degree heat rose from the blaze, sucking oxygen from the outskirts of the city with hurricane force winds.
"Operation Thunderclap," as it was called, destroyed three times as much of Dresden in two days as the Germans destroyed of London in 1940. German estimates placed the death toll at 135,000. The accepted number today among Anglo-American scholars runs about 50,000. By comparison, the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki killed 40,000.
The city's strategic value scarcely warranted the intensity of the attack. Dresden lacked heavy industry or vital transportation routes; rather it was a city of arts and letters and widely considered one of the architectural gemstones of Europe. Whereas bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki stopped the war with Japan, bombing Dresden did not effect the outcome of the war—nor was it intended to do so.
One might think that the infinitely greater destruction of the world war aggressed by Germany and Japan and the unthinkable Holocaust of European Jewry would have kept the Allies from giving Dresden's destruction a second thought. Quite the contrary. Following the attack, some in the American press asked whether we had resorted to terror bombing.
Winston Churchill, who initially supported Thunderclap, expressed regrets following the attack and questioned its motivation.
To this day "Dresden" is a symbol of how forces fighting for an upright cause can collapse into the barbarity of the enemy. The ongoing effects of Dresden are seen today in American insistence on military-specific targets and ever more surgical weaponry.
Vic's wife Joan, thin as a reed doll, with a full head of short snow-white hair, sat quietly in an overstuffed chair at the far corner of the triangle of our conversation. Tears dripped down her white wrinkled face for an hour while her oxygen machine puffed in time, enriching the air to her emphysemic lungs.
We all noted her stillness.
Joan was a brilliant conversationalist with a pithy wit made wiser, more hopeful and quite-to-the-point by her Christian conversion and her concomitant immersion in Alcoholics Anonymous at age 60.
Following Vic's prayer of confession she turned to me and said: "This is the first time that Vic has talked about Dresden. As far as that's concerned, this is the first time he has talked at all about the war in 50 years. I have never seen these pictures until today. Thank you for coming over on this special day to give Vic the opportunity to share his feelings. He has held this in for a long time."
A year after Vic's unburdening, our son Evan lived in former East Germany as a foreign exchange student. He learned early on that Dresden's fires still smolder in the hearts of some Germans and that Americans best not poke the coals. During the communist years, some East Germans believed that the Allies had dropped nuclear weapons on Dresden.
God blessed our son with thoughtful, nurturing host parents; they were atheistic, did not have bad memories of communism, and were among those still tender to Dresden. Near the fifty-first anniversary of the Dresden bombings, Evan hoisted his courage and told his host parents that back home he knew one of the bombardiers of Dresden and that this elderly gentleman was sincerely sorry for the mission. This surprised and pleased them very much.
Vic responded to the news of their positive reception of his confession with a grin as wide as the world. He squeezed his eyes until they squinted tears. His nose dripped and he snuffed as he laughed out loud. "I can't tell you how glad I am to hear that my story helped someone. I never expected this to happen. Isn't God amazing?"
Two years after Vic's confession, I sat next to a young Japanese pastor on a bullet train from Tokyo to Osaka. He spoke about issues facing pastors in Japan. First he talked about suicide. I understood this. At the time I was pastoring in Montana, which has the highest suicide rate in the U.S. behind Nevada. Then he told me that Japanese veterans of World War II were just beginning to unburden themselves from their experiences in the war.
That war leaves deep emotional wounds weeping pus inside combatants is beyond debate. Some like Grandpa Bernard do not live long enough for the purulent to surface. For some the infection presses its way to the surface over many years and then appears only as a tiny pimple until lanced by a question like: "What can you tell us about Dresden?" It gets pretty messy, splinters emerge, confession disinfects the flesh, and the assurance of forgiveness stitches the wound.
Vic's infection contained at least two splinters: survivor guilt and moral guilt.
As he grew older, Vic's expressions of survivor guilt became more frequent and more emotional. He never took a scratch in ninety missions, but shrapnel from artillery shells tore through his plane and his flying buddies. Hearing them in agony on the flights back to England plunged a hot poker into his heart, branding him slowly, deeply, and permanently. Vic could not comprehend why he survived while others died.
He mixed gratitude to God with questions he knew God would not answer. I listened to his questions and tried to stay as quiet as God. After all, I was God's ambassador and ambassadors shouldn't make things up.
Vic's guilt about Dresden was altogether different, required a different response, and was more quickly handled, if not resolved.
The Dresden raids gave Vic a low grade fever of moral guilt of which he was rarely conscious. When he did think about it, he wasn't sure whether he needed to ask God's forgiveness or not. He was, after all, a soldier obeying orders, fighting an enemy determined to enslave the world. He did not order the raids, and he could not have refused to fly. On the other hand, we hold war trials for soldiers who intentionally slaughter civilians. The comparison is not precise, but close enough to force the question in a mind like Vic's: do I need to confess?
This begs the larger issue. As unpopular as the question is, does a soldier incur moral guilt in war?
War is like divorce: the vast majority should never happen; but even when they need to happen, no one leaves these debacles spotlessly, no matter who is in the wrong. No one emerges from the tomb of divorce resurrected, only resuscitated.
If glad to be alive, they nevertheless live in the same flesh, with enduring pain for things they said and did, which feel like moral guilt one day and righteous anger the next. Divorce is a sin that ignobles even the most innocent parties. It is no small miscalculation for an innocent victim in a destructive marriage to refuse to confess the times they lowered themselves to the level of the party in the wrong.
Ironically, it may be precisely this feature of participation in war that causes us to honor our veterans.
The United States sets aside two national holidays to remember war veterans. Fire fighters spend a greater percentage of their lives in fire than soldiers do under fire, and many of them spend twenty, even forty years, living minutes away from the fire of their death. We don't have national holidays for fire fighters. (However they do drive glossy candy-apple red and lime green machinery in parades for veterans.) Perhaps the difference is that although fire fighters risk their lives to make us free, they never have to set a building on fire with people inside to save a neighborhood.
Perhaps we honor our veterans not just for facing death on our behalf, but for confronting the ultimate ethical dilemma: the killing of innocents—even enemy soldiers conscripted into a war they hate—and holding that memory for the rest of their lives. It is selfish to be unwilling under any circumstance to sacrifice one's life for the great good of others. To be forced by demonic circumstances to kill people caught in a war they hate, in order to destroy a fiendish enemy, is a sacrifice of soul way beyond offering up the body.
If it takes a soldier fifty years to plead for cleansing, I want to be there when it happens. Can I plan to be there?
Not unless I can plan what I learned on my mother's knee.
Looking back I realize that God shaped an unrepeatable and strategic relationship between Vic and me.
On a long drive home from a fishing trip with much casting but little catching, we passed the time with Vic's war stories. In the midst, Vic told me he'd flown Dresden in one sentence wedged into a story of a bombing mission in which he had skillfully avoided destroying a cathedral.
He described visiting the cathedral years later at length and with great emotion. Did telling the story of missing a house of worship remind him of a mission in which he bombed nothing but civilian targets?
I do know this: Vic wasn't ready to talk about Dresden at that time. He merely dropped the Dresden needle, knowing I'd remember where he'd laid it in the haystack.
I am not certain that I ever would have asked Vic about Dresden except someone in the house was watching television on the morning of February 13, 1995, waiting for the weather report. I walked by and war clips caught my eye. When the reporter announced the fiftieth anniversary of the bombing of Dresden, I knew where I would be that afternoon.
I called Miles, our youth pastor, and asked him if he would like to go with me to Vic and Joan's: "It's the fiftieth anniversary of Dresden. Let's see if Vic has anything to say about it."
Miles was ready. I called Vic and asked him about the possibility of a visit and stated the reason. He seemed pleased and the result was stupendous.
Just as I believe that the day of Vic's self-revelation hinged upon my happening onto a news report on the morning of the fiftieth, I feel certain that he would not have mentioned Dresden if we had not been stuck in a car together, passing the time on a long drive home from a fishing trip. (I remember the exact stretch of highway along the Gallatin River where he told me.)
Vic and I belong to different generations, but our family traditions of fishing made us fishers from the inside out. We grew up fishing with our fathers, and thus we fished intimately with men whose earliest memories involved fishing with loved ones. Indeed, the earliest memory of my life was catching a fish in Colorado with my father and mother at the age of two. A mere two years later my grandfather arrived at our home with his electric drill and his post-traumatic stress syndrome.
Vic and I acquired fly fishing by nature and by nurture. Like goslings bonded to the first adult they see, we bonded first to men who fished, and we continued to bond easily with men who fish for the rest of our lives. God made the bond and he used it to heal Vic's long-held wounds.
I fished with a friend I loved and listened to stories he could tell no one else.
I paid attention to him in conversation like we both focused on moving water, looking for a plip or a dimple, a big fish rising cautiously. So often the biggest fish leaves the tiniest trace, barely breaking the surface tension. When I see a big fish dimpling the surface across the stream in a place to which I cannot cast or wade, I never forget that fish or that place. Vic knew he need only speak of Dresden once and I would not forget.
Oh, the visits with God we miss in the name of efficiency!
I must make my ministry more than just organizing workers. I must spend leisurely time with people, allowing connections God established in our relationship from before birth to evoke the immense and subtle narrative of our interrelated lives, tipping on the brink of consciousness until it tumbles into a free-fall materialization of God.
I may not be able to do this with everyone in my church, but I must at least do so with some—if I am to call myself a pastor.
I cannot plan genuine friendship but I can be available and pay attention.
That I choose to ask questions about their life makes it a pastoral friendship.
That I quench my desire to match them story for story makes it a disciplined friendship.
That I resist the temptation to decide God's purpose in the relationship too early permits the entire story to be told—of intersections we did not invent, bearing fruit through circumstances too outlandish to make up.
When God reveals himself as the architect of our friendship from the beginning, the distinction between pastor and parishioner disappears and together we know God as our Pastor in eternity; where history and politics are not dissolved, rather, their promise is fulfilled.
David Hansen pastors Kenwood Baptist Church in Cincinnati, Ohio.
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