I was born during World War II, which ended 75 years ago. Mother always said I was a "war baby," although I only have one memory of the war. Mother taught me to add the words "and God bless all the boys everywhere" at the end of the "Now I lay me down to sleep" prayer. All the boys everywhere were the American troops fighting the Japanese and the Nazis. My Uncle Clarence was in it from North Africa all the way to Germany, and Uncle Blaine, Uncle Dick, and Cousin Bill all served. I was two and a half on VJ Day.

WWII was the largest conflict the world has ever seen, and symbols and artifacts were everywhere when I was a kid. Valley View Park, a local amusement park, had a little merry-go-round composed of small ships and tanks labeled Saipan, Tarawa, Iwo Jima, and other famous South Pacific battles. Uncle Clarence married a German girl named Eva, and our neighbors the Henckens bought a surplus glider body to use as a chicken coop. My favorite store was the Army/Navy store.

The one-room school where I went to 4th, 5th and 6th grades had a small library of about 50 books, two by Ernie Pyle. He wrote vivid descriptions of GIs living in the mud and rain of the Italian campaign and battling through France. One evening walking by our pig pen in a cold winter rain, I thought, "This is what our soldiers experienced in Italy."

In the 1990s, Linda and I stopped at the Ernie Pyle museum in Dana, Indiana. All the other visitors were World War II vets, and I wondered what would happen when they died off. Downtown Dana had a soda fountain that sold a tasty drink called a "Green River." We bought a facsimile newspaper of Ernie Pyle's columns which we took turns reading to each other as we drove west, choking up at the end of each column.

A few years later we stopped again in Dana. The soda fountain had been sold, the town was dying, and the museum was closed. I doubt if more than one in a hundred people today would know who Ernie Pyle was. He was the model of a great war correspondent. He was killed in the Pacific theater a few months before VJ day.

In the fifties, our family had a weekly huckster route in Nesquehoning, home of a small bookstore where I bought paperback books on the War. I read books on Tobruk, on submarine warfare, on the bridge at Remagan, on the Huertgen Forest, on the resistance in Norway, on Rommel, on escapes from German prison camps, on Guadalcanal, and forty or fifty more.

My reluctance to carry an I.D. card or even get a cell phone dates from that period. Escaped prisoners or Jewish refugees were always asked for their papers, always under surveillance. Grandson Gavin is amused when I use a fake name at fast food establishments; Linda is annoyed when I forget what fake name I used.

What would I have done had I been in Germany in the Thirties or in occupied France? That is a question that has bothered me all my life. When I was a teenager I knew exactly what I would have done. I would have joined the resistance, fought back, sheltered a Jew.

Now I have much more understanding of average German citizens than I did then. What do I do when the U.S. government tortures prisoners, or deports young people who have been living here since they were babies? What do I do when my government takes children away from their parents and puts them in cages? What do I do when the President lies daily and incites violence?

I write letters, wear a T-shirt that says "Immigrants Built America," start a few arguments, attend some demonstrations. It hasn't helped. What would I do if the U.S. government arrested me or threatened members of my family if I spoke up? I really don't know.

~ Roy Christman