Christmas Eve, Ardennes Forest, 1944

My Late Father shared this with me for the first time days before he passed.

The temperature dropped to 12 degrees, and my father, PFC Jerome Selman, AUS, 87th Infantry Company B Heavy Artillery, couldn’t feel his toes in his boots. Mess doled out the Christmas dinner of minced meat pie and boiling coffee in tin cups, bitter as Hell and too hot to drink but nice on cold fingers.

“No shit-on-a-shingle tonight!” Lou Sperazza, my Dad’s buddy, joked as Mess handed out the luxurious Christmas fare. Lou meant the famously inedible and too readily available creamed dried beef on hard-tack crackers that kept the troops from starving yet in a state of perpetual nausea. The men had just dug in for the night at the lip of the Ardennes, their regulation shovels getting bent from hacking into the frozen earth. They were at least two days away from the interior of the Duchy of Luxembourg and beyond to the narrow but deadly Moselle River, across from which was the Front, the fortified Siegfried Line on the German border. The mincemeat, my father recalled, was slightly rancid but was all they had until they could reach the safe house in Luxembourg; mincemeat pie and his lieutenant, Stanford Birken’s, thoughtful Christmas gift of one piece of his precious Walnetto sucking candy for each member of the company.

“My girl back in the States sent me these. My Christmas gift to you boys. Now get your asses in your foxholes and go to sleep fast. We’re doubling the night watch, so you don’t need to worry about no Nazi slittin’ your throat. It’s Christmas, whattaya think, the Nazis don’t celebrate Christmas? Where in Hell d’ya think Christmas started? Just get the fuck to sleep, tomorrow’s gonna be Hell.”

The 87th, whose motto was “Stalwart and Strong” and whose insignia was the golden acorn, was comprised of young men, primarily well-educated college boys from the New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania areas. My father had gotten a free ride at the tough Cooper Union Engineering School, graduating with honors. He caught up with his lieutenant, saluted, and spoke.

“Sir, do you still want me to set the perimeter defense, or will that not be necessary, given the doubling on the watch?”

“Selman, don’t you hear good? I said don’t bother with it. Just get to sleep!”

The cold had gotten to everyone in the company, foot soldiers and officers alike. No one thinks clearly when you’re that cold. My father knew this as he slid down the icy earth into his foxhole. His buddy, Sperazza, crawled on his belly and leaned over the ditch.

“Remember, Jer, don’t dig it no deeper than 5 feet 11 inches, ‘cause 6 feet is a grave.”

“I had to go deeper, Lou; I got these damn perimeter cassettes.”

Sperazza shook his head, mumbling to himself, and crawled back to his foxhole five feet away.

The Christmas Eve sky over the Ardennes was crystalline, the wind stinging and sharp, whistling at times through the thick evergreens. No light, no sound except the near silence of snow falling from the trees onto the frozen earth, the looming endless sky filled with cut diamonds glistening over the ice.