THE FAITH OF G.I. JOE

Henry T. Waskow was raised in the cotton country south of Temple, Texas, one of eight children in a family of German Baptists strapped enough to sew their clothes from flour sacking. Waskow was fair, blue-eyed, short and sober. A teenage lay minister, Waskow took second prize in a statewise oratory contest, won the class presidency at Belton High School, and graduated with the highest grade-point average in twenty years. He graduated from Trinity University where he joined the Texas National Guard. Waskow became captain and his company engaged German units at San Pietro in Italy in December 14, 1943. He was mortally wounded by a shell fragment at age twenty five. His body was returned to base where Ernie Pyle observed several of Waskow’s men grieving over their captain. He wrote his most famous dispatch about the incident which appeared on January 10, 1944, covering the entire front page of the Washington Daily News. Hollywood seized on the story and a year later released The Story of G.I.Joe with Burgess Meredith as Pyle and Robert Mitchum as Waskow who dies on a mountainside in Italy.

In a last will and testament mailed to his sister for safekeeping and made public more than fifteen years after his passing he told his parents in a ten-paragraph meditation:

“I would like to have lived, but, since God has willed otherwise, do not grieve too much, dear ones, for life in the other world must be beautiful, and I have lived a life with that in mind all along. I was not afraid to die, you can be assured of that. I will have done my share to make this world a better place in which to live. Maybe when the lights go on again all over the world, free people can be happy and gay again…If I failed as a leader, and I pray God I didn’t, it was not because I did not try. I loved you with all my heart.”

Belton High School was renamed for him. As Veterans’ Day (Armistice Day) is observed we honor those who served  and paid the supreme sacrifice. May we emulate their faith and courage in confronting evil.