D-DAY AND LIFE LESSONS FROM MY BARBER
I wrote this essay and submitted it to the Writer’s Digest 2019 Competition. Surprisingly, I won 8th place in the Memoir/Personal Essay Category.
This story is dedicated to all those who served. However, I wanted to honor those veterans who passed on their wisdom to the younger generation of veterans while cutting hair. Additionally, I wanted to honor one branch of the military that often gets overlooked: The United States Coast Guard.
When I was about nine years old, I moved to a town outside Albany, New York, ahead of my adoption by my new family. As soon as I moved, my father began taking me to Ernie, his barber. Ernie, who would become my barber growing up, was an older gentleman who ran a small shop off one of the main roads in our town. The shop was small and was decorated with a few mementos to include a small picture of Ernie with his fellow mates aboard a ship. Little did I know that my barber Ernie, and that photo would provide me an essential lesson from D-Day, the infamous WWII battle, on humility, sacrifice, and service on my own military service.
When my father and I would visit for our haircuts, Ernie would wait for the other customers to leave before he would engage my father about politics for he knew that my father worked for the state government. They would talk about national and state politics that included the growing tensions in the Middle East where the United States was prepared to go to war to liberate Kuwait from Saddam Hussein and his Iraqi army. I remember Ernie telling my father that he was apprehensive about the imminent war and was scared to see young men die. At that moment, I didn’t understand or appreciate his sentiment.
As I grew older, I became interested in the military. My adopted grandfather had been a veteran of WWII and the Korean War, having served in the Army Air Corps and later the U.S. Air Force. At that time, I was interested in flying and dreamed of joining the Air Force. This passion led me to join the Civil Air Patrol, an Auxiliary of the Air Force where kids as young as twelve could learn about aerospace, emergency services, search and rescue, and learn to fly.
My participation in the Civil Air Patrol made my visits to Ernie’s more interesting as I told him about my adventures. It was then that I began to gain more insight into Ernie and a few of the older gentlemen who were his clients in his shop. Ernie told me he had served in the Coast Guard, and the photo on the wall was him and his crew; however, he didn’t go into the details of his service.
After graduating from high school, and because I didn’t meet the eyesight requirements to be a pilot in the Air Force, I chose to enroll in the Army Reserve Officer Training Program in college. During my holiday breaks, I would always go back to visit Ernie for a haircut. He was always grateful to see me and asked how my Army training was going. Conversations with Ernie, like my grandfather, about my military training, helped us bond. In many ways, he became a second grandfather figure or elderly uncle to me.
One summer, I came home from the Army’s Airborne School, where I learned to jump out of perfectly good airplanes, and I visited Ernie for a haircut before returning to college. I told him that the weekend before my qualification jumps, I had seen the movie “Saving Private Ryan” and had asked if he had seen it. Ernie became quiet and then slowly said he had not seen the movie and may not see it. I don’t remember if I asked him why he wouldn’t see it, but during my next visit, I would learn why he seemed apprehensive.
During my next college break, I visited Ernie for a haircut. When no one else was in the shop, he told me he had seen “Saving Private Ryan” and shocked me when he said the first part of the movie was just like he remembered. I was confused and asked, “what do you mean because you only told me you were in the Coast Guard?” He proceeded to tell me that he served in the Coast Guard’s amphibious force, and that meant he had been one of the boys that had driven the amphibious landing ships onto the beaches of Normandy. He said he made several runs onto the beach and remembered that during some of the landings, some of the boys got off, and on others, none of the boys got off. Each time, he would return to the transport ship to help unload the dead and wounded, washed the landing craft, and then go to the other side to receive a fresh load of soldiers. Ernie said the movie accurately portrayed the sights and sounds of D-Day, but what it could never portray the horrible smell of death, gore, vomit, and saltwater mixed as those young men faced the horror that awaited them on the beaches. Ernie could still see the faces of the men he had driven onto those beaches. After hearing Ernie’s story, I would later learn that the famous photo of the D-Day landing titled “Jaws of Death” was taken by Coast Guard Chief Petty Officer Robert F. Sargent.
Two years later, I was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant in the U.S. Army and was on my way to Fort Knox to attend the Army’s Tank School. Before leaving and reporting to Fort Knox, I once again visited Ernie. There were several older gentlemen there that day, and Ernie was proud to tell them that I was a brand-new Lieutenant in the Army and that I was going to be a “Tank Commander.” One of the older gentlemen said he was a tanker and then began cursing “George this” and “George that” and it hit me after he mentioned ivory handle pistols that he was talking about the infamous General George S. Patton who this gentleman had briefly served as a driver during the Sicily campaign.
Another gentleman said he had served in the Army’s 10th Mountain Division during the Italian Campaign. During the war, he was a medic and was present when Senator Bob Dole was wounded. Now he was a surgeon at a hospital in Albany. There was another older gentleman who also served and who lost his brother who served in the Marine Corps died in Iwo Jima. Looking back, I can’t believe I never took the opportunity to take notes or record these men. They were humble and patriotic. They served and sacrificed their youth for future generations.
Upon finishing school at Fort Knox, I served overseas in South Korea. 9/11 had happened while I was abroad, and like most of the world, I watched the World Trade Center collapse. I came home and once again visited Ernie’s barbershop. Ernie was getting older, and I wasn’t sure if I would see him again because I had orders to move to Germany. We talked a bit about how the world had changed since 9/11 and the new war that had started in Iraq. During the visit, I gave Ernie my tank platoon challenge coin that leaders would give as a gift or an award to Soldiers. Ernie tried to control his emotions but cried as he thanked me for the coin and said he was scared to see young men like me die in this new war. It was clear he was having flashbacks to Normandy as he said that. That was the last time I would ever see Ernie.
I deployed to Iraq in 2006 and served during the period when the country imploded into a sectarian civil war. Before my deployment in 2006, my little brother was killed in Baghdad. Then, several close friends of mine were killed during my deployment from 2006–2007. To make matters worse, Ernie had passed away in September 2006 as I moved with my unit to the city of Ramadi, one of Iraq’s most dangerous cities. I never had a chance to say goodbye. I never had a chance to render one last salute to my barber, a man who had seen the horrors of war on D-Day and taught me the values of humility, service, and sacrifice.
I continued my service and deployed to Afghanistan in 2012. Sadly, I lost another friend during that deployment bringing the total of friends and family I lost in Iraq and Afghanistan to 12. While losing 12 people you know in war is hard, I reflect that conversation I had with Bernie about D-Day. The boat he drove on D-Day carried 36 soldiers onto the beach, and as he said, there were times that half got off and others that none got off. I lost 12 friends and my brother over the decade while Ernie saw 12 men be slaughtered by German machine-gun fire in seconds as the door ramp dropped on his landing craft. Despite that, he kept going back to the ship to get more men and then back to the beach.
My generation has served in war since 2001 in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other parts of the Middle East. My generation has suffered the loss of thousands of lives and even more wounded with either physical, mental injuries, or both. Some have even called my generation the “New Greatest Generation” after the “Greatest Generation” was given to Ernie’s generation. It is this perspective that I am always careful to say that I “served in a combat theater” rather than “I fought in combat” because unlike some of my contemporaries or Ernie, I was never in a situation where I had to fire my weapon in anger. My worst day in Iraq or Afghanistan would never pale to my contemporaries who fought, were wounded, and killed as a result of firefights with terrorist or unseen road bombs, or the horror of driving men onto the beaches of Normandy.
I shared my story of Ernie recently with fellow service members and veterans as we discussed whether the lessons of war we had learned since 9/11 would give us an edge against an equal, or peer, competitor that had the same means to conduct large scale warfare unlike the lower intensity war we have waged against Islamic terrorist groups. I stated that while we had endured the hardships of the wars in the Middle East, there was no guarantee any of us would be prepared for the type of war Ernie and his generation had seen. I said that while we all experienced loss of friends in combat, none of us could say we have seen more than 10, 100, or even 1,000 die in a matter of minutes or hours.
As I approach 20 years in the Army, I continue to reflect on my conversations with Ernie growing up. I remember the photo that Ernie had in the barbershop of his Coast Guard mates. It was the only evidence he had in the shop of his experiences that highlighted his sense of humility, service, and the sacrifice he had made during WWII. It reminds me of the photos I have of Iraq and Afghanistan. I am forever thankful that Ernie entertained a boy’s dream of wanting to become an Air Force fighter pilot and then later grow to become a Soldier. Not many people can say their barber had a life-altering impact on them, but I can say I am proud to have known Ernie, who was more than a barber who gave haircuts. He was a barber whose humility, sense of service, and sacrifice continues to serve as a life-long lesson for this humble soldier and veteran who has also grown to hate the idea of seeing young men and women die in war.
If you wish to learn more about the U.S. Coast Guard in WWII, I recommend you read the article titled The Coast Guard’s World War II Crucible at the U.S. Naval Institute site at https://www.usni.org/magazines/naval-history-magazine/2016/october/coast-guards-world-war-ii-crucible
Lieutenant Colonel Chad M. Pillai is an Army Strategist who has served in a variety of assignments in the U.S., Korea, Germany, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He earned his Master in International Public Policy (MIPP) from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in 2009. He is a member of the Military Writer’s Guild and Army Strategist Association.
