My Grandfather's WWII Story Changed My Views On What's Happening In the World
His experiences on the (dis)honor of war should be a wakeup call for us all.
In 2009, I got a writing assignment that changed me. I was a sophomore in college and got the monumental (and interesting) task of sitting down to interview a grandparent of a great-grandparent. The purpose was clear, sit down with them and find out what their life was like when they were young. We had to get the whole scoop. How did they grow up? What was work like? How did they keep healthy? How did they live?
At first, I panicked about the task. Thanks to some warped dynamics in my family, I didn’t have a particularly close relationship with any extended family. I spoke to my grandparents once a year, awkwardly, if all went according to plan, and I hadn’t seen either of my living grandparents in years.
True to form, I waited until the last minute. I didn’t know who to ask or how. For my family, an interview was a pretty intimate conversation, and I was convinced I would get turned down.
In the end, I went to my mother and asked her to contact my grandfather. Quickly approaching his 90s at this time, I knew he was a hard-working man who had a wealth of experiences in WWII and beyond. I had no idea just how deep those experiences ran…or how they would change the way I see the world in conflict now, at this moment.
Dust to eat, and dust to breathe.
I sat down to interview my grandfather over the phone in the winter of 2009. Per the request of my professor, the questions were pretty standard. When were you born? What was your family like? What was it like when you were young? When you were a teen? When you were a young adult?
This was the point at which my story deviated from that of my peers.
While most of them took quick, straightforward interviews about growing up in the groovy 60s — my grandfather started his story in Kansas, during The Great Depression. He wasn’t the child of a groovy social movement. Instead, my grandfather was a child of the Dust Bowl.
Dust to eat,’ and dust to breathe and dust to drink. Dust in the beds and in the flour bin, on dishes and walls and windows, in hair and eyes and ears and teeth and throats, to say nothing of the heaped-up accumulation on floors and window sills after one of the bad days.
- Caroline Henderson
My mother’s father and the rest of his family lived through a very real version of The Grapes of Wrath.
At once heartbreaking and stoic, my grandfather told me the story of the stock market crash and his subsequent leaving school around the age of 12. The family got hit hard, and he and his brothers had to join his father in work to make sure that the 8 of them didn’t starve to death. They headed down the road and found that work at the farm of the neighboring Dutch family, where they were paid in preserves that fed them through the winter.
For Christmas, the whole family would split a single Hershey’s chocolate bar and sing songs. They hiked into the nearest town to pick up huge bags of flour and potatoes, which were also used to make their clothes.
The whole family slept on the floor, on a makeshift pallet that was piled with whatever rags they could quilt together. My grandfather lived his whole life like this and thought that was the only way life existed…until he joined the army.
Falling into the “lap of luxury”.
In 1942, my grandfather was walking through town when he saw a table of army recruiters setting up. They were “buzzing” about an all-new style of battle, and a new style of soldier that was going to help America “tap the Jerrys”.
Paratroopers, the recruiter called them. Highly trained and specialized soldiers who were going to jump out of planes and save the day.
The recruiters saw my grandfather (not a huge man, but an athletic one) and thought he would be perfect. They recruited him there on the spot, with him signing his name right away. A few weeks later, he was on a bus to boot camp, and weeks after that he was on a plane bound for England where he was going to learn the realities of his brave new endeavors.
Boot camp was the first time my grandfather ever saw a mattress.
“It was the lap of luxury, I thought,” he told me, laughing over the phone. “I’d never seen such a fancy setup and couldn’t believe I got a whole mattress to myself!”
Of course, that luxury didn’t last long.
What my grandfather didn’t know that day on that dusty Topeka street, was that he was being enlisted into the 101st Airborne Division. What’s the big deal? This is the division that they based the seminal classic, Band of Brothers on.
Assigned as a medic, my grandfather spent the next 3–4 years in and out of various conflicts.
He jumped out of planes in the dead of night, falling from the sky in winter with his friends dropping all around him. Once, my grandfather told me, he made a jump with 5–6 men he was especially close to. A couple of them had grown up together.
By the time he hit the ground after their jump, all of his friends were dead and he was left on his own to rendevous with the rest of his group.
My grandfather faced endless dangers as America battled Nazis and the threat in the Pacific. Yet, at the end of those *years* of battle, he remained alive. Why?
George Meggison survived WWII not because he was a hero. Not because he had some special powers, or was protected by a special form of luck. My grandfather survived WWII because he was a medic, and medics were off-limits in terms of active combat.
It’s true.
According to my grandfather, for most of the war, he carried no weapon. There was no need. He was not a baron of death. He was a combat medic, whose sole job was to take care of his men, and the dying and wounded they came across.
My grandfather described multiple occasions of running across fields of the dead, pulling friends (alive and otherwise) out of the carnage. One or twice, in the middle of an active battle, he was forced to flee cover so he could assist his injured and dying compatriots.
Why wasn’t he killed?
Why didn’t the Nazis blow his head off? Why didn’t some German infantryman shoot him through the heard? Deprive him of a return to his friends and his family?
The short answer: an honor code.
In WWII, no matter who you were fighting and what side, there was a rule (and expectation) that medics were to be unharmed. That’s why they didn’t carry weapons. Their job was life and life alone. They didn’t deliver death, therefore they were immune from receiving it.
Looking back now, this story has changed my entire perspective on the world and, specifically, the conflicts we see playing out on our phones and our TV screens right now.
Why my grandfather’s story changed the way I see the current situation in Palestine.
For me, there is no separating what my grandfather experienced at the hands of the Axis powers in WWII and what is happening now. For me, his entire story taints and shapes how I can see and respond to the horrors of the Palestinian genocide.
It has all come down to Al-Shifa Hospital, the one undeniable war crime that speaks louder than any of the other 11,000+ war crimes that have been committed by Israel thus far.
Now widely condemned as a false-flag operation by Western nations and major media outlets alike, the situation at Al-Shifa Hospital continues to deteriorate.
Before the all-out breach of the facility (remember: a hospital, not a military fortress) the IDF was concentrating attacks on doctors and first responders. Caretakers were shot through windows and doors, killed in the hallways, and sniped if any of them stepped outside to render aid to the dead and the wounded.
Watching videos of doctors, nurses, ambulance drivers, and good samaritans being sniped in the streets as they try to help the injured makes me think of my grandfather. I cannot help but remember his voice and the stories he told me of pulling bodies from the muck while bullets sprayed around him.
Had my grandfather been a medic in this conflict, had he been a member of Doctors Without Borders or UN medical response teams — he’d be dead. The IDF would have shot him and killed him, even though he didn’t carry a weapon and served only the gods of life.
That’s why my grandfather’s story matters.
It tells the story of escalating cruelty. Of a society increasingly without honor.
My grandfather was safer in the hands of the Nazis he was there to defeat than he would have been in the hands of the descendants of the people he helped free from concentration camps.
It’s mind-boggling to me, on a human level, that there’s any more discussion left. How could anyone, at any point beyond this moment, justify how Israel has decided to “protect itself” by destroying the innocent root and stem?
This isn’t what my grandfather fought for.
One thing I know for certain, though my grandfather has been gone for close to a decade. This is not the world he fought for. This is not the world he watched his friends die for. This conflict, this cruelty in Israel, is not the world he thought he was building for his children. It’s not why he came home with night terrors and emotional scars that he bore for a lifetime.
My grandfather fought in WWII because he believed in the cause. He believed what he was told by the U.S. Government and those in power he respected. That he was helping to make this world better. That he was creating a place where those emaciated faces behind the barbed wire never had to go hungry and terrorized again.
Maybe that’s why he left in the end. Maybe it wasn’t the call of old age that got my grandfather.
Maybe he grew tired of watching the world he destroyed himself for eating itself alive. Maybe he gave up after nearly a century of the same old cruelty, again and again.
This Israel is not what my grandfather fought for. This world is not the one he nearly died for…and that matters. Because he made unimaginable sacrifices for that world, sacrifices that should be honored by all of us who bear the burden of freedom men and women like him gifted to us.
We owe the great, compassionate men and women of their generation more. We owe ourselves more. But we cannot be that more unless we are first there for the very *least* of us. That starts with Palestine and with the stands we take right here, right now.
That world my grandfather dreamed of, that he threw himself out of planes for, isn’t out of reach. It’s out of our comfort zone, and that’s a very different animal.
Each of us, all of us, could change this world now by saying, “Never again,” and meaning it. But it comes down to every single one of us. Is that a stand you dare to take? Maybe a better question is — do you have the *moral fiber* and *moral integrity* to take such a stand in a world that hungers for pain and bloodshed? Do you have the compassion of a human being left inside of you?
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