This is dedicated to the men who fought in war, both who died and who survived. I’m just a kid so I don’t know anything about surviving war but I hope that I at least did these men justice, showing how hard it is to come back home after experiencing the worst the world can throw at you. A few men that I look up to very dearly that just passed are

Frank Perconte : March 10,1917 -October 24,2013
Edward ‘Babe’ Heffron: May 16,1942 –December 1, 2013
Earl ‘One Lung’ McClung :April 27,1923-November 24,2013

I hope that you guys like it, Currahee! (We stand alone together).







































What If I Survive


70 years and 20 seconds.

70 years is the time it takes to turn a young man to an old man, give or take a few years. 20 seconds is the time it takes to turn a young man into a dead man or a hero. People call me a hero but that isn’t exactly true. The guys who are heroes are the dead men. The guys who were buried in some strange place all alone in pain that nobody should ever experience or witness, the mothers and fathers that get a letter saying ‘I’m sorry your son was,’ and that’s about it. Those are the people who are heroes. I am not a hero. I’m just a guy that made it through because of God’s will. I survived all because I’m blind, I didn’t want to leave my friends but I did. And I hate the sickening relief that I got to survive because death hadn’t caught me yet.
20 seconds is also how long it took me to become blind. The mortar hit the tree next to me, blowing it up in ten seconds; it took five seconds for my friends to throw me into a foxhole trying to stop the bleeding and another five seconds until I realized I couldn’t see. A lot can happen in that time. Battalions can be wiped out in that sort of time, men just wiped off the face of the earth. We were ten football fields apart, over half a mile. Just half a mile separated us from them and even that couldn’t save us.

I participated in all of the great battles of the European theater, D-Day, Market Garden, and Bastogne. My journey ended in a fight in Noville, our scrape to get across into a German occupied town. That’s where my journey ended, when I stopped being T/4 Joseph Elliot. When I stopped being a citizen soldier and just became a citizen again.
I remember when I was just a kid, back before Hitler started the war, just a naïve kid. When Americans were the strongest people to walk the earth and I was indestructible. I can’t help but laugh now, remembering back when I thought I was my own superman. In the war I got three purple hearts, three reminders that we all die someday. Parents don’t want to bury their kids, and yet here we were and here they were, German kids and American kids. We were burying each other because we had a job to do. I’m not a war monger and I’m not a war protester, I’m just a guy who has seen war and tell it how I saw it.

I saw a lot of great people die in war, citizen soldiers. They volunteered for it, regular guys who had dreams of their own. To teach kids, to have a family, become artists or athletes. These are the people that I fought with, and they are the people I respect most. These are my friends. They were my friends.



My best friends in war were Sgt. Ryan O’Connell, Private First Class William Jacobs and 1st Lt. Adam Johnson. Ryan and I were from the same town, we lived just down the street from each other and went to Catholic school together. Ry was a quiet kid, strawberry blond with blue eyes and a real subtle southern drawl from living in Virginia for the first 10 years of his life. He was a medic and a fine one at that. Will had short brown hair and the only one in my platoon with freckles. He looked like a nine year old even though he was the same age as I was. I don’t remember where he came from; I don’t think he shared actually. He had a weird accent we couldn’t quite place so we teased him about being a Jerry (Englishman) in disguise. Adam was a new lewy, arrived right before the big jump so he didn’t go through the training with us so a lot of guys gave him the cold shoulder at first. He was a serious guy but a real jokester when you got to know him, I offered him a cigarette on the plane ride to Normandy and he talked to me about his hometown. He was a country kid unlike me, lived almost at the tip of Michigan so he was a hunter growing up. I never saw a better aim.

70 years ago to this day the fellas and I were digging foxholes in Bastogne. We were cold, whiny and hungry (in that order.) We didn’t even have a whole pack of Lucky Strikes between us all! Air support was a bust because the planes kept dropping our supplies over to the Germans; we had a short supply of food, ammo, winter supplies and morale. Will would try getting us to sing songs though to raise our spirits, his favorite seemed to be stupid love songs. We’d throw clumps of frozen dirt at him after he’d sing the same tune for the twentieth time; I forgot to mention the boy was tone def!
We were lined up in the forest ready to take Noville. It was a risky move and we all knew it. We had about 1/8th of a mile of ground to cover before we reached the town and even then that didn’t provide safety. The Germans had something that we didn’t. Cover and tanks. Nothing scarier than knowing that you had artillery aimed at you like you had a target painted on your chest.
“Get ready!” Our C.O yelled out. “Everyone get ready to move!”
I crouched down low holding my rifle tight to my chest, the ring on my finger dug into my skin so hard it started to bleed. We waited in silence, just waiting. Waiting for the signal.
“GO! GO! GO!” he yelled finally and we charged. To me it sounded like some sort of animal, we all roared a combined roar and our foot steps pounded against the frozen land. We had to get to cover as fast as we could but before we even took ten steps guys started to fall. Bullets whizzed by cutting through the frozen air, mortars were being blown from both sides and we tried heading for the closest cover we could find. I ducked behind a group of small trees trying to catch my breath. I looked over to my right to see Adam, Ryan and Will taking cover behind a large hay stack.

“Ry!” I yelled as loud as I could trying to get their attention.
Ryan looked over with a panicked look on his face. I figured it was because he was the medic and right now, there were just too many dying men for him to go to. Boy, I could never be more wrong.
“Joe get outta there!” He yelled and I caught a look of horror on his face before the trees around me blew up.
I was tossed to the ground like a marionette that got its strings cut. I just collapsed and God knows I tried but I couldn’t push myself up. I remember hearing guys telling me that you can always hear the bullet coming before it hit; I guess that didn’t apply when it came to mortars. Maybe it was just my particular shell. My limbs were rigid from the shock and my ears rung.
“ Joe!” I heard faint voices getting closer, they were screaming loudly and I wanted to tell them I was alright, I wasn’t hurt. But then I felt the blood running down my face and there was something in my eyes that wasn’t supposed to be there.
“Joe it’s Ryan! You got to lie still, you hear me? Lie still!” I don’t know how but I could hear Ryan but I couldn’t hear my own screaming.
“Ry! Ry I can’t see! Ryan I can’t see! Why can’t I see?!” I screamed clutching their arms, they tried getting me to calm down, and telling me it was going to be alright. I felt a stab into my arm, most likely a serrate for morphine and after that I must’ve passed out. I can’t remember much but I could remember distant yelling and a finger wiping warm liquid on my forehead, probably my blood to show the medics at the station I got morphine. By the time I woke up again a nurse was talking to me in French I think.
“You’re going home soldier. You’re going home.” And then I passed out again. I was going home.


By the time I was ready to go back home I had been healing for six months, six months of blindness. At first it was hysteria, some tears and then acceptance. There were worse things than being blind right? Well okay the acceptance part came later in life after some realizations. Realizing I’d never see the Golden Gate Bridge again, that I couldn’t see my girlfriend Lisa again or my folks. I wouldn’t be able to walk on the beach at sunset or sunrise and bask in the sight of the sun or drive Lisa to our secret point and stare at the stars with her. I’d never see her grow old with me and I’d never see our kid grow up. The realization was worse than being blind itself.

Being home wasn’t as fantastic as I thought it’d be. Being in battle was different than being in a safe home and not having to worry about someone wanting you dead by a long shot. Being in war, I was always distracted by what was around me, never focused on the things that might happen to me, only the things that were happening to all of us. Being home, things were different. I had nights where my thoughts were only about my friends, whether or not they survived and the guys I killed. I thought about how we could’ve been friends under different circumstances, thought about the mothers and fathers that would get the messages an American killed their son. I also thought about all the civilians that were casualties of war, how they weren’t even a part of this war and yet they lost their homes, their families and friends and their lives. I heard about how my friends liberated concentration camps where Jewish people were being held. There are times when I wonder how people want to kill the people that remind them what humanity was.

When I didn’t have sleepless nights I had nightmares. One of my friends that died was named Jackson, Wade Jackson. I met him in basic training and I was next to him when a German mortar blew up his foxhole. He showed me a picture of his fiancé back home, told me how he wanted to be a school teacher. Other times I dream of being back in war, watching all my friends get cut down my artillery. But this time the war was here in America, the bystanders were families that lived down my street, the casualties were kids dressed in olive drab holding rifles and wearing over sized helmets. Those are the nights when I can see and those are the nights when I curse it the most. I sweat and I cry and I swear those nights and my parents try to calm me down because I can’t stop crying when I dream of Ryan and the guys dying.


I got a letter not to long after arriving home, it was from my friends. They all made it through the war and were coming to visit me. The three of them made it back home. William rode in a wheel chair because his feet were so ruined from trench foot he lost one. Adam surprisingly enough wasn’t hit once but he was always in the front of an attack. His men were important to him and he always put himself first whether on patrol or an advance. Ryan was awarded a bronze medal for bravery, my friend the medic was hit two times, each time for being in the front of danger weaponless trying to save a life of one of our own.

They had seen war and I could see how it changed them. They were more serious somehow, it was sort of like a piece of them was missing but I could still hear the faint innocence in their voices. They were still the same swell fellas I knew.

We talked to each other for a long time, made jokes about our days in basic, I teased Adam because some of the guys played a joke on him when they were on a run. He just started and they could all run seven miles up hills so running flat ground was like sleep walking to them and he was huffing and puffing trying to trudge along. I couldn’t see it but I knew his face was red; his whole face was red when he was embarrassed. Ryan chuckled and asked if I remembered the time he filled my boots with eggs he snagged from the kitchen and I had to go run Currahee again for the second time that day for messing up my uniform. It was great catching up with them again, they had changed yet it didn’t seem like it at all.



That was about 68 years ago or so, since then they all left me. Will got into a car accident three years after visiting me and died from brain trauma. He was only 28 years old, just a little kid. His family had him cremated and I got some of his ashes in an urn. Adam died at the age of 85, he had lung cancer from all the smoking we did. We all knew that smoking was bad for us but we were just kids, smoking was calming and I honestly didn’t think I’d make it long enough to have to worry about the result of our pastimes. My good friend Ryan died just last year; he was 91 years old and lived a good life. His wife gave me his purple hearts and a letter he wrote me right before passing. I don’t think I ever cried so much. I attended the funeral a few days after he passed. I’m the last of my group of friends.


When I was a kid I never worried about dying, I knew it happened but what kid thinks that’ll happen to him. When I was just a little kid all I worried about was how much allowance I needed before I could buy my bike and then at 16 I worried about work. Then I had to worry about surviving in a fight in some strange place with strange people who wanted to kill me, some life. I went back to college, got my masters degree and taught literature. I decided I wouldn’t let my blindness handicap me and I read and taught in brail. I married my dream girl Lisa, got a wonderful son who I named after the three bravest guys I know. Ryan Jacobs Johnson. Four years ago my beautiful wife died and Ryan started to help take care of me and I helped him with his six year old daughter Renee. I lived a good life.
Now I’m lying in the San Francisco hospital holding my son’s hand and trying to tell my granddaughter it’ll be alright. In the war I was so afraid of dying but now I’m not afraid anymore, I lived a full and exciting life and great people were in my life. I’ll never forget them.

“It’s okay Renee,” I whispered quietly. “You know why it’ll be okay?”
I heard her sniffle and wipe her nose. “No. Why Papa?”
I smiled and kissed her forehead. “Because I’m gonna go and visit my friends again. Papa is going to go see uncle Ryan and uncle Adam again. Wouldn’t that be nice? I’m going to be able to see again and I’ll be watching over you and your dad.”
I heard them both sniffle this time before Ryan put a hand on my shoulder. “We’ll miss you dad.”
I nodded and gave a small smile, closing my eyes. “I love you guys.”
Renee hugged me and kissed my cheek. “Bye bye Papa.”


I was afraid of dying too early but when my time came I didn’t fight back and I wasn’t scared anymore. I would see my friends again, all my friends who passed before me and this time we wouldn’t have to worry about being separated. I never liked romanticizing death but after the war I imagined those who died parachuting back into Toccoa, all young again and healthy. They were waiting for the guys who were still alive and they were like guardian angels, well, guardian soldiers.

Things became cloaked in light and I blinked my eyes hard trying to get used to seeing again.
“Bout time Joe.” I turned and a smile spread across my face when I saw Ryan, Will and Adam walk towards me.

“Kept us waiting.” William punched my arm and Adam just nodded smiling at me. I looked back to see a field of long green grass with white stripes painted down the sides. The barracks looked brand new and I saw the rest of the guys in t shirts and gym pants.

“Come on Joe! We’re about to start a game!” I heard Wade yell holding a baseball bat.

“Can’t keep the men waiting.” Ryan grinned and handed me a baseball.

I chuckled. “Currahee.”