Memories of a War: One Man's Road to The Battle of the Bulge

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Given that people had less than seven years to fight WWII and more than seventy years to write about it, it is perhaps not surprising that most of us should think everything that can be said, has been said. And yet…
And yet, here in this little book, is something new. It is the quiet but firm voice of someone who saw the war with boots on the ground, and occasionally face in the mud. This is a war far removed from the great sweep of history, of battling ideologies and the fate of continents. It is equally far removed from Hollywood heroics or video game shoot-outs, where death can be reversed by a re-boot. As Jack Durrance observed it in The Four Feathers, “In the heat of battle it ceases to be an idea for which we fight. Or a flag. Rather we fight for the man on our left, and we fight for the man on our right.“
Avery Weeks was not an eager volunteer. A child of the Great Depression, he grew up in a northern Californian world that John Steinbeck would have recognized. As a WWII army draftee, a slight curvature of the spine saw him shoved into a reserve unit that was treated more like a punishment battalion – at least until their positions were being over-run in the Battle of the Bulge and then they were suddenly declared heroes fit for action.
While many did not come back at all, Avery came back with some internal battle scars that took him many years to iron out. Yet along the way he became a remarkable and wise human being, as well as a good friend to many. As a writer I can say he has a rare talent – the ability to plunge the reader deep into the action, sharing experiences and horrors from half a lifetime ago. And always, when things are getting grim, his sense of humor and irony rescues us from the abyss.
He has an abiding hatred of wars as the most obvious of human failures, yet he has an abiding love of ordinary people, with all their quirks, hopes and fears. He doesn’t believe in heroes, so I will simply say he is a good man and I’m proud to be his friend.

Brendan Foley
Co-writer, Under the Wire