Time's telescope

And now we pause, once more, to stare at another mile marker. There is always one at which to stare, it seems, as the years clatter along like autumn leaves skirling across a sidewalk. Some just require longer pauses than others.

And so to May 8, 2020. And so to V-E Day, plus 75.

Seventy-five years since the Nazis came out with their hands up, trailing the cover story of all history's villains: That they were just following orders, or that they didn't know nuttin' about those camps, or that they'd never been Nazis at all and had sworn no allegiance to their demented Fuhrer and the rest of the gangsters.

In any case, the thing was done, 75 years ago today. The Third Reich was dead. Hitler was a pile of ash in the shadow of the Reichstag. The gangsters had either joined him or were in desperate flight.

And if it all seems so distant now -- like looking through the wrong end of a telescope -- it's only because it is.

Seventy-five years on, the boys who went to Europe and left their buddies on Omaha Beach or in the hedgerows or in the forests of the Ardennes are themselves either gone or going. The institutional memory of the war in Europe is down to a handful of 90-somethings and 100-somethings. With our World War II vets, we're now where we were two decades ago with our World War I vets.

Which means a guy named Charlie Pearson may or may not still be with us.

Charlie Pearson spent his World War II not in Europe, but in the Pacific. And one afternoon I sat in the living room of his modest home just south of Georgetown Plaza and listened to him tell me about Tarawa and Okinawa and other things that were, by then, 50 years behind him.

He told me how, at Tarawa in '43, the landing craft dumped him out 1,000 yards off a tiny pile of coral called Betio, and how the water was over the boys' heads in a lot of places, and how at some point in the long, long slog toward the narrow beach a burst of Japanese fire ripped out a bunch of Charlie Pearson's teeth. And he told me how, on Okinawa one pitch-black night in '45, he shot a Japanese officer who'd wandered into the American lines, and how he found a letter to the officer's wife on the body, and how he held onto it for years with the intention of tracking down her down and returning her husband's effects.

He never did, of course. Couldn't really bring himself to.

In any event, 50 years has become 75 now, which means it's been 25 years since Charlie Pearson told me those things. As much time has passed since I sat in his living room as had passed between then and the Vietnam War. And as much time has passed since V-E Day as had passed between that day in 1945 and the days when Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant were still living.

In other words, Reconstruction and the aftermath of the Civil War were as distant to the boys of Omaha Beach and the Ardennes as those boys are to us now. And some of the leaders of their war were born before the Wright Brothers or radio or telephones or incandescent electric lights.

A few more mile markers to contemplate, on a day suited to it.