Reconciliation Road

allow myself to notice that my chest is tied in knots, my breathing is halting, and I seem to be shivering despite the heat. I am, I suddenly recognize, close to tears. I did not know what to expect when I finally came to my grandfather's grave, but I did not expect this, certainly not anything this intense after all the years. My head spins, my heart aches as memories of my grandfather come flooding back, those I still treasure, and those I have tried to forget.

I remember playing catch with him in his backyard in suburban Detroit and how this man we all called "Poppy" urged me to really "burn one in" and so I did, sending him a scorcher that broke his finger.

I remember descending into his basement office lair, the bookshelves overflowing, the lighting dim, the air cool, even during those muggy Midwest summers. He would be sitting hunched over his old Underwood, a cloud of cigar smoke encircling his head, as his two fingers produced what sounded like a burst of machine gun fire.

I remember tagging along when my grandfather went to the Detroit News, visiting the editorial page department where he worked, a hushed place with heavy wood paneling, leaded glass windows, bookshelves laden with weighty volumes, and where everyone was contemplating the serious issues of the day. But what I remember more was the roar of the presses in the bowels of the old building, starting slowly at first, then building to an imposing crescendo, and how soon there would be delivered to my grandfather's desk a copy of today's paper, smelling of fresh ink and urgency. To then see my grandfather's byline on the front page—"By S. L. A. Marshall, News Military Analyst"—seemed imbued with such magic that I soon resolved to pursue this career myself.

I remember, too, my grandfather giving the ROTC commissioning speech at the University of Virginia in 1969, the day after the twenty-fifth anniversary of D-Day, and how I was sitting in the crowd among those in freshly pressed uniforms who were about to become officers. My grandfather was speaking to hundreds of people gathered on the magnificent lawn designed by Thomas Jefferson, but it seemed he was speaking just to me. For he was using the occasion in Charlottesville to sum up life's lessons only weeks before his sixty-ninth birthday.

"True decision-making," he said, "is the resolution of a dilemma, a leap into the dark where nothing is certain, but some

family duty. But as the years of college passed, amid the tumult of the late 1960s and the war, I came to take more pride in what I saw as my creative side—English major, sports editor of the college daily, devotee of foreign films, Hemingway's prose, the Beatles' music. People I knew were shocked when they saw me in my Army uniform for Tuesday afternoon ROTC drills; I would respond with what I hoped was a shrug that conveyed this was not the real me.

But there I was on the stage, this newly commissioned second lieutenant in the Infantry, an Army branch assignment I had not sought, and I was just about to raise my right arm when my grandfather snapped, "Don't you dare salute me!" And then he enveloped me in a hearty bear hug, while expressions of surprise rippled through the crowd, followed by applause. Little did I know then that this public embrace was destined to become one of the last close moments the two of us would ever share.

Twenty years later, I look down at my grandfather's grave and wonder what he would think if he knew that I had come here on a research mission to discover whether S. L. A. Marshall, probably the nation's foremost military historian, was indeed "a fraud" and "a fabricator," as was now being alleged in national publications. Me a reporter on his trail trying to determine the truth about his life and work. Me of all people.

For I had done something my grandfather could not abide—I had taken a stand against the Army. I had finally come to a point where I could no longer uphold family tradition when faced with all-but-certain assignment to Vietnam. I had become convinced the war was wrong, for both moral and political reasons. That I would not go to Vietnam was something I had decided during my time in the Army. And that left me with just two options: I could try to win an honorable discharge from the Army as a conscientious objector, following the complex process in place then; or I could go to Canada or Sweden with my wife and try to create a new life there. Either course seemed sure to incur family wrath and rupture, with my grandfather and probably my father as well.

I had decided to seek discharge as a conscientious objector; I preferred taking a stand to taking flight. But my options were so limited that what I was doing did not seem courageous to me. Like so many men of my generation, I was trying to resolve the Hamlet

the Vietnam Memorial in Washington. Because my grandfather and I were never reconciled. A few cautious letters passed between us, but no more. Which is why I did not attend his funeral. I figured I was not "welcome" there either.

What finally does bring me to my grandfather's grave is a national controversy early in 1989. Cate, his widow, had died only weeks before a front-page story had appeared in the New York Times under this headline—"Pivotal S. L. A. Marshall Book on Warfare Assailed as False."²   Then came the article in American Heritage that had prompted the Times's piece, a ten-page lead story filled with accusations about Marshall's 1947 book, Men Against Fire and its surprising assertion—that only a few American infantrymen fired their weapons during combat in World War II. Marshall said that, on average, only 15 percent of infantrymen fired their weapons, and never more than 20 to 25 percent. He discovered this startling phenomenon, he wrote, "in the course of holding post-combat mass interviews with approximately four hundred infantry companies in the Central Pacific and European Theaters," what he termed a "systematic collection of the data."³

It was no such thing, contended Sarah Lawrence historian Fredric Smoler in his American Heritage article largely based on the research of two other men—Harold Leinbaugh, a World War II company commander and later an FBI agent who was incensed when he finally happened upon Marshall's assertion; and Roger Spiller, an Air Force enlisted man who became a civilian historian at the Army's Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. The American Heritage article asserted there was no proof that Marshall did "company level interviews" during World War II and that his finding on firing came about because "Marshall made the whole thing up." This was, the article concluded, "a peculiar hoax."⁴

The magazine did not stop there, not in this accusatory age. Marshall's own background was riddled with similar deceits, according to American Heritage. He never received a battlefield commission in World War I, as he had long claimed, and he was "lying" when he said he had commanded troops in combat. Marshall, the article asserted, was a maker of myths.

 

1
Detroit Years

I KNEW HIM, or I thought I knew him back then. My grandfather was famous, I certainly knew that, and that had a tremendous hold on me when I was a child. I was not just John Marshall, I was the grandson of S. L. A. Marshall and that made me more important, truly special, at least in my own mind. I did not go around bragging about my grandfather exactly, but I was never that hesitant about mentioning the connection to teachers especially, or others I wanted to impress. A child's adulation is such a simple thing, so pure, so undemanding, even stronger than love in a way. I did not truly know my grandfather back then, nor did I need to. What little I knew was powerful enough. I knew he was a newspaperman, I knew he was a general, I knew he wrote books about wars, including Pork Chop Hill, which had been made into a movie starring Gregory Peck. And I knew my grandfather traveled all over the world to places I could scarcely imagine; he was always departing for somewhere like Korea, or Israel, or South Africa. And other famous people always met with him overseas, I remember hearing. Often-told family tales further increased my grandfather's stature in my eyes. He was supposed to have played semi-pro baseball, supposed to have been interested once in a singing career, supposed to have survived numerous plane crashes and other perils. And he often appeared on television—what more could a kid ask of his hero? Until I was twelve, we lived just a few miles from my grandfather's house in Birmingham, Michigan. We visited there often,

time we visited his house. To this day, I can still smell the cigar smoke that clung to his skin and his clothes, such a strange odor to a child, sour and sweet and dense.

The two families of Marshalls were particularly close. My grandfather was married to his third wife, Cate, who was much younger, and they had three girls about the same age as my brother, my sister and me. We were all great pals. My grandfather's young family made him seem less like a traditional grandfather to me. We were much closer than that. He was another father to me almost.

The two families of Marshalls even had our own private club back in those days. Our club was called the Phuzzant Buddies, a club that somehow came into being after my younger brother mispronounced "pheasants." We had special cloth patches made with our Phuzzant Buddy emblem, although we never got around to having them affixed to blazers, as we always said we would. And we had annual Phuzzant Buddy meetings convened around my grandfather's dining room table, very official meetings with minutes taken and actual agenda items discussed, most often who else in the world might possibly be worthy of Phuzzant Buddy membership. It was not an honor we casually dispensed.

We still had our Phuzzant Buddy meetings on Thanksgivings after we moved to Cleveland when I was in the sixth grade. I remember the trek back to grandfather's house, the crowded Country Squire station wagon speeding along the Ohio Turnpike, everyone in such a holiday mood, our anticipation growing about the times we would share again.

But the two hundred miles that now stood between us bred a new distance. Our family visits were far less frequent, and were sometimes strained from our trying to do too much; we wanted to reclaim the way things were, but they usually fell short. The past, it seemed, had passed.

My grandfather, who had been such a strong presence in my childhood, became instead a distant relation who sent presents on special occasions, including a check and a leather-bound Webster's dictionary when I graduated from high school in 1965. Along with it came a note that is still pasted inside the cover today:

"Dear Johnny, I do not think I can make it for your graduation.

 

paunch. People continued saying that when I started to do well in English classes, particularly in writing. Those comments intensified when I became editor of my high school newspaper. The words had the ring of truth to me by then. My grandfather had gone from hero to role model for me. I was going to be a writer, too.

Then I was working on my grandfather's newspaper and living in my grandfather's house, the special connection between us acknowledged, at last, by him. I wish, though, I could remember more of that summer, what he said and what we did, places we went together, moments we shared, perhaps a ball game at Tiger Stadium, especially in light of what came later.

I do remember my grandfather was writing a Vietnam book in his basement office that summer, and how he would finally emerge upstairs around 6:00 P.M., exhausted but triumphant, a gimlet mixed by Cate soon raised in toast to another day's writing well done. I remember how he took an interest in what I was doing at the newspaper, solicited my observations on what was going on there, although he did keep his distance, not wanting to put undue pressure on me. I remember, too, how he treated me like one of his family, but also an adult, with few restrictions on when I could come or go, which I appreciated at nineteen. And I remember sitting in his book-lined study when he was gone and working on some of my own writing, pained love poems as I recall, although what I wrote mattered far less than the chance to sit in his place and imagine myself as a real writer, imagine myself as him.

When I left to go back to college at the end of the summer, I was flush with what seemed to have been built between us—a new and closer relationship, more mature, with a real affection and respect for each other that seemed sure to last. And that was reinforced the following spring when he sent Battles in the Monsoon, which he had inscribed: "To John Marshall goes this first copy of the new book—and Johnny, I hope you like it."

But college brought distance between us. I saw my grandfather only once or twice more before we were reunited on the stage in Charlottesville. By then, he was well-known as one of the country's staunchest defenders of American intervention in Vietnam, and one of the most outspoken critics of the press' performance there ("The most wretchedly reported war," he wrote in his much-noticed foreword­

2

Setting out in September

MY COPIES OF MY GRANDFATHER'S OBITUARIES from national publications had long remained buried in a folder marked "SLAM." I seldom removed the folder from my file cabinet over the years; there seemed no point in dredging up such bad memories. But now, in the wake of the controversy about my grandfather's life and work, I retrieved the obituaries, searching for any hint of fraud, things that might be suspect. There did not seem to be much, other than the notation he was "the youngest officer in the United States Army in World War I," the sort of sweeping claim that the controversy is calling into question. Otherwise, the obituaries were prominently displayed, lengthy and full of praise. S. L. A. Marshall, who stood 5 feet five, was described by Time magazine as "a towering military historian who analyzed all the wars of modern America." It noted that he was "seldom far from the sound of gunfire," then continued, "Out of his experiences in the Korean War came his most esteemed books, The River and the Gaunt­let and Pork Chop Hill. His writing was distinguished by narrative drive, a gritty attention to the details of combat and a plain-spoken sympathy for the men who suffered and triumphed on the front lines. He could not agree with people, he said, who thought that 'war is a game in which the soul of man no longer counts.' " ¹

Could this be the same man who was now being accused of "maligning American infantrymen with Men Against Fire?" Could

conduct face-to-face interviews with those involved in the controversy, as well as those who knew Marshall best—family members, fellow historians, compatriots, people like Gen. William C. Westmoreland and Mike Wallace, if they will see me.

Because I have begun to discover that my grandfather was a far more intriguing figure than I ever suspected. My opinion of him had been colored for years by our bitter break; I saw him as a harsh and unrelenting bantamweight bloated on his own sense of self-importance, with a distinct tendency to be vindictive, even cruel. But a different man was starting to emerge in my research, someone who still wore his flaws like a loud suit, but also a self-made man of the sort seldom seen anymore, someone who did not graduate from high school and still managed to create a historic life.

Writing for the first time about my grandfather and what had happened between us had also forced me to confront the pain of my estrangement from my family and my past. Too long, I had kept it a secret that I had been a conscientious objector. Too long, I had kept it a secret that I was disowned by my own family as a result. And I had let this fester, this wound to my soul. I am not alone in this predicament in late twentieth-century America. Many families are scattered across the country, going about our separate lives, isolated from loved ones at great cost that we may not acknowledge. As writer Norman Mailer has observed, "Very few of us know really where we have come from....We have lost our past, we live in that airless no man's land of the perpetual present, and so suffer double as we strike into the future because we have no roots by which to protect ourselves forward, and judge our trip."⁴

My own journey had seemed so frightfully predictable at one time. I was Wally on "Leave It to Beaver," right down to the varsity jacket and burr-head flattop, the product of Republican parents in the suburbs and Midwestern public schools, president of the Junior Council on World Affairs, in no way a rebel. Then, I had gone to Virginia, a southern gentleman's school steeped in tradition, no caldron of student activism in the 1960s. Yet somehow I had forsaken my family tradition and refused to fight my country's war.

Was it only those tumultuous times, I wondered now. Was the split with my grandfather an inevitable result of Vietnam and the 1960s? Or was it because of his personality, and maybe my own? Is

first house. And then we tried to have children. And tried. And tried. We had tried for a year. Various doctor visits followed, various tests.

There was, finally, some medication Anne could take which might help. Within two weeks, she was pregnant. Nine months later, we were rushed into an operating room for an emergency Caesarian at 3:00 A.M., a nightmarish experience, but with a beautiful conclusion, our little boy.

We named our son Thatcher Scott Marshall. Thatcher is a family last name from my mother's side of the family. I wanted no first name or middle name with even a hint of Marshall. All our endless discussions of names had finally forced me to recognize the real reason I did not want children before was what had happened between the generations of Marshall men, and how I did not want any part of that as a parent.

But now I am a parent and I am amazed every day by what I might have missed, the discoveries, the tenderness. I cannot imagine my life without Thatcher, this amazing little bundle of love and life, the Big Guy, the T Man. He is another reason to undertake this trip. There will come a time when Thatcher will wonder about his famous great grandfather and I hope to be able to respond with some knowledge and maybe some insights. I do not want my son to be as cut off from his family past as I have been.

Thatcher has become an important part of my life. Anne is absolutely essential. And she is so steadfast that I had not anticipated seeing her crying, crying for one of the few times in the years I have known her, as I finally back my car out of the driveway at the start of my journey. She had always insisted we would make this trip work somehow, so I had given little thought to the moment of my departure. But now it is upon us and streams of tears are rolling down her cheeks and all her remarkable optimism seems drained not just from her face, but from her whole body. She points the camera at me; I force a smile, let go with a wave, a self, conscious gesture, silly, looking, dumb. I then drive away, my stomach churning.

The route is familiar, at least at first. The towering skyscrapers of downtown Seattle, this once-distant city now discovered with a vengeance. The Eastside suburbs with their gleaming office parks. The foothills of the Cascade Mountains up ahead on Interstate 90.

By late afternoon, I leave Washington behind, after dense

 

3

Liberating Paris

OREGON GIVES WAY TO IDAHO, Idaho to Utah, Utah to Arizona, the trip picking up definite momentum, 342 miles one day, 559 miles the next, 329 miles the day after that. The vastness of the West fills the windshield, all these cowboy movie panoramas of broad blue skies, brute mountains, red buttes, barren hills, scrub desert. The only sound often heard out here is the whoosh of traffic along the superhighway; otherwise, a profound silence lies across the land, broken only by sudden gusts of harsh wind. I pass through places which already look and smell of fall, with trees turned shades of gold and rust, peaks dusted with snow, this season's apples for sale at roadside stands. I pass through other places where summer still lingers, hot and insistent, these late September days. Zion National Park is a natural cathedral encountered at the end of the five-hundred-mile day on the road, the evening sun striking rock formations of imposing shapes and impossible hues, bright reds, pale pinks, burnt oranges, producing feelings of reverence in places called Angels Landing and The Great White Throne. The Grand Canyon comes the next day in the first cloudy weather of the trip, the dull light turning the canyon's colors to muted tones of salmon and cement, the disappointed tourists in full vacation regalia. The sun blazes down again by the time I reach Phoenix, cross Dead Man Wash, watch the temperature keep climbing to 106 degrees, hear a matter-of-fact voice on the radio point out that this is the 134th day of the year to top 100 in the Valley of the Sun. It is

telling me about what impact such letters had, how even though General Davison was away on the day when he visited, there was special treatment from those on the general's staff.

Westover emphasizes that this was not the first time he had experienced such a response because of his time with Marshall. Westover has given lectures on Marshall in places as distant as Chile and Pakistan, had been considered "an instant celebrity" at his last Army duty post at Fort Riley, and had been mentioned in twenty-five books, all because of his association with the man he still calls "the Colonel."

Westover readily acknowledges his debt to Marshall, but he makes no attempt to repay it with adulation. He has his criticisms, sometimes harsh criticisms, of S. L. A. Marshall. A year of shared foxholes and jeeps and occasional close scrapes gave Westover many glimpses of the flaws of the man, so many of them stemming from Marshall's resounding self-confidence and the way he confronted the world. As Westover says, "He was a cocky bastard; he never expressed any self-doubts."

Westover makes this comment as we sit across from each other in his living room. He is settled into his favorite lounge chair and I am on a couch ten feet away and the walls echo with Westover's recollections of my grandfather. I must have asked some question to set off this monologue, but that question has long since been lost, buried under an avalanche of reminiscence. A half hour passes, then an hour, then another hour, and still Westover keeps it up, as my mind grows numb. I dare not interrupt, I keep reminding myself, something important may come of this, something I must not miss. Only later do I discover that Westover has replayed his standard repertoire of Marshall memories, the well-traveled stuff of countless party chats, public speeches, published articles.

I hear how the first words which Westover ever heard about Marshall had come from one of his former professors at the University of Missouri, who had traded his cap and gown for a major's uniform and was working in the new Army military history section in the Pentagon. He warned Westover, then about to depart for the Continent: "There's a crazy man running around Europe with wide-­open orders. His name is Marshall. He's no good—don't have anything to do with him!"

I hear how, three weeks later, Westover had not only encountered­

commander of the Twenty-ninth Division] has been so happy with our work that we've suddenly become important people around this headquarters," Westover wrote. "Everyone stands in awe of the Colonel." In later years, Westover came to believe that Marshall's group critique method had "revolutionized writing of military history. Because of it, battles are recorded more accurately and in greater detail, making histories that are written today more alive and accurate."

But Westover's favorite recollection of Marshall is that crazy time in the summer of 1944 when the two recorders of history suddenly became participants in history during the Liberation of Paris, source of so many legends, some even true, and many centering on the exploits of Ernest Hemingway. Marshall knew Hemingway, had even spent time at his home in Key West in 1936, and they would meet again on the road to Paris in a bombed-out cafe called Claire de Lune, where Hemingway would burst through the door and yell, "Marshall, for God's sake, have you got a drink?"

Or so S. L. A. Marshall wrote eighteen years later in an article called "How Papa Liberated Paris" published in, of all places, American Heritage. But Westover cautions me, "Some of what your grandfather relates there, I don't remember in the least. Slam's point of view was that his memory was infallible. At times, though, I think your grandfather's memory was not as accurate as he thought it was."

What Westover recounts about the Liberation of Paris becomes a telling lesson in the malleability of history, how history is shaped by the memories of those who witness it and the intentions of those who record it. For Marshall's magazine article, written soon after Hemingway's death, was clearly intended as a corrective to the legend of the Liberation of Paris, a way to replace Hemingway Myth with Marshall Truth. As Marshall wrote, "Many tall tales have been written about Force Hemingway. The real story is good enough. As a war writer, Hemingway spun fantastic romance out of common yarn."¹ But Westover's first reading of the American Heritage article convinced him that Marshall was making some myths of his own.

Before he wrote the article, Marshall had asked Westover if he would mind sharing his own recollections of the Liberation of Paris and Westover, ever the good soldier, had responded with an eight-thousand-word account gleaned from his letters to Eloise. Westover was a diligent writer of long letters home filled with detailed observations,

But the differences between the accounts of Westover and Marshall are far more striking. Carlos Baker, author of the definitive Hemingway: A Life Story, had read both accounts, along with that of Hemingway's driver. Baker wrote to Westover: "I've got your account, I've got Marshall's account. I've got the driver Pelkey's account. Are you sure you were in the same war?"

For it was not just in the minor details where the accounts differ, although there were plenty of those. Marshall and Westover do not agree on how many people were present at the legendary Liberation dinner they attended at the Ritz with Hemingway; do not agree on whether correspondent Ernie Pyle made it to Paris; do not even agree on the name of the Spanish woman who rode in their jeep for days during the advance. "Irene," says Westover. "Elena," says Marshall.

The recollections of Marshall and Westover really diverge when danger lurks. Westover recounts a hazardous encounter with a burning German ammunition truck, "a rather difficult obstacle for our party in the open jeep." He writes, "We would have to pass that exploding vehicle and cross a bridge. The tankers merely pulled their heads down into the turrets, but we had no such protection. We would have pulled off the road, but we were living an impossible escapade and were not willing to pull back. I dropped back and allowed a fifty-foot gap to develop between our jeep and the tank ahead. When there was no longer any chance that he would stop while we were alongside the blaze, I gunned the jeep and roared past. Instinctively, the Colonel, Irene, and I pulled our heads low, but there was no protection in that vehicle. Fortunately, there was no explosion as we passed and the searing heat was too brief to make any difference."

Westover's burning ammunition truck is, in Marshall's account, a burning ammunition dump, the length of a block. And Marshall recalls: "The stacked shells were already blowing sky-high, and even at a distance, the smoke, blast and flame seemed like an inferno....Metal showered the roadway, and the heat was like a blast from molten slag....

"I yelled: 'We can't make that run.' 'We've got to,' Westover yelled back, 'or the tanks will crush us. They're not stopping for anything.'

 

challenges and the dangers. I see him sitting beside a foxhole, smoking a large cigar. I see him standing beside a jeep in the snow, bundled up in a bulky greatcoat, just after his promotion to full colonel, his helmet bearing a much-oversized eagle of the rank, painted there in jest by his men. And I see him conducting a group critique in Brest, down on all fours, a field map spread out in front of him, a pencil pinpointing some detail, all that taking place when, as Westover recalls, firing at the front was not far off. That evening would see one hundred rounds of artillery hit the outpost.

Finally, I excuse myself and retire to the study. I am exhausted, need to sleep, but cannot. My mind reels with questions and more questions to ask Westover and how to lead up to the big question that has brought me here. American Heritage had directed much of its ammunition against a central tenet of Marshall's Men Against Fire, his finding on firing. The American Heritage article cast grave doubt on whether he was pursuing the question of weapons firing during the war or had tracked such matters with, as he wrote, "a showing of hands and questioning as to the number of rounds used."

Westover had vehemently contradicted American Heritage's assertions when I interviewed him over the telephone from Seattle. He stated flatly that he and Marshall had discussed firing problems during their time together—what seemed solid proof that Marshall was pursuing the matter. But now in Tucson, I must try to determine if Westover, blind-sided by the Marshall controversy, has taken to stretching the truth. To protect the reputation of his old boss.

actually somebody who least needed to do that. His striving to prove himself surely came from wanting to overcome the handicaps of not having height and not having an education....If you've got a college education, you've got the credentials. But he didn't have those credentials, the credentials to command the respect he wanted. So he put up that front instead."

That front made quite an impression on people, including John Keegan, the esteemed British military historian, author of The Face of Battle. Keegan first encountered Marshall during a 1964 speech in England: "He chose to wear the dress uniform of a brigadier general. It sat very badly on his tiny, corpulent person. It went even worse with his manner, which was aggressive, hectoring and rude. He cheerfully insulted those who asked him what he thought were stupid questions. He exuded energy and vulgarity in about equal measure. But I did infallibly detect that he was someone apart and above any military historian I had met before. I subsequently came to believe, as I still do, that he was touched by genius."¹ 

I move on to ask Westover about one of the more annoying points in the Marshall controversy—the assertion by some of his critics, Leinbaugh particularly, that Marshall had "never been under fire" or had "never been in combat." I think both contentions are probably wrong and are tangential anyway. The worth of Marshall's great volume of work is not going to be changed by whether he had fired a weapon in anger or dodged a bullet. Westover had been with Marshall when they went to interview combat units at the front, so I still feel compelled to ask about whether they were "under fire" and how Marshall had reacted then.

"The Colonel wasn't cautious; he took a business-like approach," Westover says. "Sometimes they would pull a unit right out of the line to talk to us, and this didn't bother him at all. He had tremendous concentration."

"But how did he act?" I continue. "Was he cocky in those situations, did he strut about?"

"He displayed not bravado—just a sense that this is what we have got to do. And we were under fire actively, particularly on that trip into Paris, in Brittany, in Brest, and at various division headquarters. He got down in his hole and snuggled in as close as anyone. He was not the type who stood there and said, 'They can't hit me.'

Westover's eyes are drawn to the green volumes of the Army's official history of World War II, this seventy-two-volume work which occupies six feet of shelf space. So many of these books are the result of the work done by Marshall, Westover, and their compatriots in Europe. The "Green Series" is their great gift to posterity—an unprecedented vein of research ore that continues to be mined by historians. There is pride in Westover's voice when he motions toward the "Green Series" and says, "Getting it while it's fresh—that was Slam's contribution."

"Military history teams went into Grenada on the third day of the invasion, using the same method that S. L. A. pioneered," adds Saunders, "although now they videotape afteraction interviews....Marshall convinced the Army that battle is a confusing business and the more you can learn from the past, the more it will help in the present. The Army is the most into this process of any of the services; the Army is really committed to this thing."

Westover and Saunders continue to chat. I find myself reflecting on how the "Green Series" and Army historians like Saunders are part of my grandfather's lingering legacy. Most of us die and leave behind little more than dust and memories; S. L. A. Marshall left behind far more. His life had such an impact that Saunders and Westover talk about him as if he were still alive today.

We adjourn for lunch, my first visit to an officers' club in two decades, yet just as I remember it—the ageless decor, the harried service, the monthly calendar of festivities still featuring surf 'n turf night.

The conversation at our table soon centers on the Marshall controversy. I ask Saunders if he attended the annual meeting of Army historians earlier in the year when one of his compatriots, then historian at Fort Benning, had presented his research paper on Marshall. It is a paper which, I have been told, went after Marshall with a blunderbuss.

"I heard Charlie White's paper on Marshall," replies Saunders, without elaboration. "Well, what did you think of it?" I ask. "And what did the other historians think of it?"

"The guys I hang around with thought it was a terrible cheap shot, but it was not terribly unexpected from Charlie White; he fires first, thinks later," says Saunders.

("'The Colonel' had intense concentration, thought in complete thoughts and seldom made corrections, so he usually single-spaced.")

These critiques could be crucial to the Marshall controversy. Their narrative provides direct evidence that firing problems did hamper some D-Day units, a phenomenon noted by the interviewing Army historian, either Marshall or Westover. As one of these critiques recounts, "Some of the men froze on the beach, wretched with seasickness and fear, refusing to move. Most of the survivors toiled painfully to the foot of the hill where the enemy might well have found and destroyed them, since they had no fire power."

One of the critiques also contains the signatures of twenty-two men, soldiers of every rank from private to second lieutenant, probably as many men of Company M, 116th Infantry, as could be assembled three months after D-Day. "This is important," I say to Westover, "because American Heritage staked its credibility on the research of Roger Spiller, the Army historian at Fort Leavenworth. Yet the magazine quotes Spiller as saying, 'I just haven't found any suggestion that he [Marshall] did company-level interviews anywhere.'''²

"This is a company-level interview," Westover says triumphantly. "The signatures would have been used by Marshall to make sure he got the spelling of the names right. THIS IS ABSOLUTE PROOF THAT MARSHALL DlD COMPANY-LEVEL INTERVIEWS."

A broad smile washes across Westover's face, with the recognition of this dent in the armor of Marshall's critics.

S. L. A. Marshall's own credibility in Men Against Fire came from his position first as deputy, then chief Army historian in Europe and his assertion that he conducted "approximately 400" group critiques of combat companies during World War II. Westover has doubts about the four-hundred-company figure—he believes that Marshall probably did one hundred critiques himself and read five hundred critiques of the historians under him-but Westover has absolutely no doubt that Marshall did conduct many such critiques.

American Heritage, on the other hand, takes Spiller's "not finding any suggestion" that Marshall did company-level interviews and then tries to build a case that Marshall's "systematic collection of data...appears to have been an invention." Since Spiller did not find company-level reports, the magazine's reasoning goes, there

article on Marshall for a British military journal and specifically asked for his comments or corrections. And yet Westover, in his written response, did not protest these statements: "John Westover, usually in attendance during Marshall's sessions with the troops, does not recall Marshall EVER asking this question [about troops firing their weapons]. Nor does Westover recall Marshall ever talking about ratios of weapons usage in their many private conversations."³

Westover now counters, "The suggestion that I was sitting in during all of Marshall's interviews is ridiculous. That is a misstatement. Often I was a few hundred yards away doing my own interviews, sometimes I was a couple miles away."

"Then why didn't you tell Spiller that was a misstatement? And why didn't you tell him then that you and Marshall certainly had discussed firing problems. Your failure to correct him makes it appear you did change your story once the controversy broke."

"I'm perfectly willing to agree that I misled Spiller, but he may have misled me, too. I wouldn't rule out that Marshall and I talked about the Queen of Sheba. I can't give you specifics about what we were talking about, but we must have discussed firing problems. I'm not perfectly sure when, but that's looking back forty-five years. I can't say on such and such a day, we discussed this."

"Or," I add, "that you definitely discussed it at all."

"I can say that firing problems did not sound improbable to me. In my own combat experience in North Africa and Italy, a hell of a lot of people didn't fire their guns in order to avoid confronting the enemy. Slam clearly should have called his finding a 'generalization.' He tried to quantify something that you simply can't quantify. I know I talked about such broad things myself, but I doubt I would ever have come up with a specific percentage, as Slam did. I do remember, too, that after Men Against Fire came out, I said to Eloise, 'A lot of the ideas in this book are very familiar to me.' Now, you come here and you are asking me, 'Did you talk about this?' But I don't remember. I can't remember."

Every word out of Westover's mouth now seems to detonate doubts in my mind. So many doubts that I almost do not hear when Westover makes an important point: that Marshall would not have had to ask troops point-blank, "Did you fire your weapons?" There are much better ways to pursue that line of inquiry.