Book Review: Dean Hughes’ Soldier Boys
by Stephen Wunderli
A year ago, I was filming a commercial for the National Hospice Foundation. They wanted to appeal to the children of elderly parents on behalf of their parents, to remind them of the sacrifices the “greatest generation” made-and to offer an alternative to dying in a hospital.
These men and women who had done so much for our country deserved better, they deserved to be at home for their last days, to die with dignity. We told the story of a man who had been a teenager at the Battle of the Bulge, survived and lived into his late seventies. So naturally, part of our cinematic storytelling was to re-create the battlefield of the Ardennes. There wasn’t much acting involved, so we hired my 17 year-old son and a few of his pals. It was an exciting scene to film. Everything was authentic, right down to the boots they were wearing and the guns they carried. All their mothers came to watch, most of them in their early 40s who had as I had, grandparents or parents who had seen the battlefield first-hand.
For my generation, there is that distance between World War II and the life we lead. Most of us have never been to war. The closest we came was watching the war in Vietnam on the nightly news when we were kids, or listening to stories by grandparents or seeing their journals. None of us on the shoot that day had ever lost an immediate family member in a war. We had led a charmed life, mostly. Watching our children grow up without that risk hanging over them. So none of us really expected, or were prepared for what happened that day. It was late in the afternoon. We wanted the golden light of sunset. The boys arrived in their cargo shorts and running shoes, and headed for the wardrobe trailer. The parents waited in the parking lot. We chatted the small talk of suburbia: Football games and soccer and restaurants and this or that teacher at the school.
But when the boys stepped out of the trailer, head-to-toe as soldiers, the talking stopped.
The boys themselves were quiet. A strange silence fell over the entire group. Eyes teared up immediately, and not just the mothers, but all of us. Here were our boys, our high school seniors. We suddenly saw them as parents saw their own boys 50 years ago—many of them, for the last time. Nearly 300,000 Americans lost their lives in World War II. The reality of losing a son, a child really, was more than we could bear.
As our children now begin to ask questions about Afghanistan and try to understand the concepts of freedom and democracy, the best learning ground is American history. Dean Hughes has written an excellent book for young readers that personalizes the ideologies at conflict in WWII. Soldier Boys is two stories: a German boy growing up in Hitler Youth, and a farm boy from Utah. They enter the war with their own disillusions, their own innocence. But it in the final scene, neither is part of the great war machine they envisioned. Instead, they are alone, in the darkness of the forest, with nothing to cling to but their own beliefs.
This is powerful story; well-crafted. It doesn’t try to do too much, but rather let’s us see the children who went to war, and the kind of men left standing when it was over. In the pile of books about this part of our country’s history, this is a must-read for middle-grades and maybe even older.
2001 Meridian Magazine. All Rights Reserved.
