Vet recalls fear, friendships

CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- He looks through an album of pictures, most more than 60 years old, going back to a time when the world was at war, back to a time when he left a wife and young son, back to a time when he fought for something much bigger than himself.

“It was a wonderful adventure” says 88-year-old Jack Worley, “and after I got over being scared to death, I was happy to be there.”

World War II was the most destructive war in world history, and Worley was part of it, leaving Charlotte when he was 24 years old to join one of the greatest armies in history.

He was a member of the 65th Infantry Division, part of the U.S. Third Army, commanded by one of the best known generals in U.S. history.

George S. Patton was controversial, profane, loved and hated, but most of all, successful. “As far as I’m concerned” says Worley, “he was the greatest soldier this country ever had.”

Patton’s army rolled across France in the summer of 1944, helped win the Battle of the Bulge in December of that year, was the first Allied Army to cross the Rhine River into Germany and in the process covered more territory quicker than any army in the history of the world.

Along the way, Worley saw the worst of war. “The ground was littered with dead bodies. We saw people with their heads cut off, their legs blown off,” he said.

The retired postman goes on to talk of an emotion most of us can’t imagine.

“I was scared to death, terrified. Anybody who’s ever been to a war and says he wasn’t afraid is either the biggest liar or the bravest man I’ve ever known.”

But even that: the constant fear, the death of friends and destruction on a massive scale, was not the worst. That came near the end, in May of 1945, when Patton’s army liberated the German death camp at Mauthausen in Austria. It was a place where thousands died.

“After we got over the shock of the thing,” Worley said, “we wondered how anybody could be that cruel. They were like living skeletons. That’s what they looked like. They were just hollow-eyed.”

He talks of more than 100 steps leading out of a quarry, all of them stained with blood, the blood of those who were killed simply because they were different.

“Those vivid memories you have of those poor, dead people over there in those concentration camps. You try to forget that stuff, but there’s no way to do it, Worley said.

Jack Worley is part of a generation slipping away; those who lived through a depression and a world war and saw things the rest of us would never want to see.

“If I had to do it again” he says, “I wouldn’t want to do it, but I wouldn’t take anything for what I did. The memories, you know.”

As he looks through his album, it’s those memories that return. There are pictures of Worley and his three closest friends, some taken more than 60 years ago, some just a few years ago at a reunion. Of the four, Worley is the only one still here. That makes it bittersweet as he remembers bonds that can be forged only in war.

“It’s real sad” he said, “because you love them, you know more about them than you did your own brother. You would lay down your life for any of them.”