Edward "Ted" Stilson has one of those stories that perhaps only a few others in the world's history can claim as their own.
While fighting in World War II, a small Bible in the left breast pocket of his shirt saved his life.
During the battle at Schmidt, Germany, a piece of shrapnel embedded itself into the Bible instead of through his heart.
As with many post-war generations, Joan Tolle finds her father's stories fascinating, and worries they will be forgotten and lost as his memory fades.
Stilson recalled some of his wartime experiences with a visitor recently. The Bible. The attitude of Germans during that time. His buddy who was shot and killed. And the souvenirs he brought back with him.
Stilson served in the 310th Anti-tank Infantry Regiment from March 1944 to April 1946.
He just celebrated his 95th birthday on Nov. 18 at Wiley Creek. The father of six biological children (and four step-children) was born in New York and attended Cornell University to study engineering, where he met the first woman he would later marry.
Due to a heart murmur, Stilson was not drafted into the war, so he had to take matters into his own hands, he said.
"I had a deferment and everybody was going in and I was not, so I went over and asked the draft board to take me," he said.
Shortly after, he was serving as a cannoneer, but then Stilson found himself laid up on his back at a hospital in Belgium with "something like pneumonia," he said. That's how he spent his first Christmas abroad.
When he returned to his platoon, they engaged in the battle at Schmidt, a town that was demolished, he recalled.
Located near the border of Belgium and Germany, the town was a strategic objective for the Allies after the Battle of the Bulge and is attributed as a win for the 78th Division, of which the 310th was under. But it was a bitter confrontation for U.S. troops, who suffered heavy losses in unfamililar terrain.
Stilson recalled the moment he took shrapnel there.
"I was in a bazooka team, and they told all the bazooka guys to get up and walk, take on the people down at the end of the falls there," he said. "We went down over the hill and they pinned us down. So the fella that I was with, the name is Ferruzzi, he was dead right away. I got hit in the explosion."
He took shrapnel in both legs, his right foot, and the Bible near his heart. Stilson was 75 when he finally had some of it removed.
The family keeps those recovered pieces as memorabilia. They have the Bible and the shrapnel that fits its place therein like a puzzle piece. And they have two more pieces of shrapnel, one of which is about an inch long, half an inch thick, and seems to weigh almost as much as a rail spike.
His souvenir collection also includes a red Nazi arm band – which Stilson found on the road one day, his dog tags, Victory and European Campaign medals, and a Purple Heart.
One of Tolle's favorite stories she heard from her dad was the one about a guy he met after the war.
"You went to a bar and you were having a beer," she reminded him. "You were down in Ohio for work and you started talking to a gentleman next to you."
The two started talking about the war, and realized they were both in Schmidt, Germany at the same time. The twist: the other guy was German.
She continued, "And you said, 'Well you son of a b***h, you're the one that shot at me.'"
Tolle also recalled a story she was told about a Jew who went to pick up the butt of a cigarette discarded by a Nazi. Stilson saw the Nazi squash the cigarette with his shoe and throw it in the water, just so the Jew couldn't have it.
"Some of them were pretty good, and some of them were terrible," Stilson said about the Germans.
"The point is, he saw so many things like that," Tolle said.
But after the war, the Germans treated the troops very well, she said, and her father had a really good time there for the few months they stayed behind.
Though proud to have played a part in taking Hitler down, Stilson isn't sure if he's made any memorable contributions to society during his lifetime. But his face lights up when he says he loves his children, so maybe that's enough.
But if this story were to have a moral, it would be this: Don't let your family's stories disappear into the abyss of time.
"It was a major event in my life. I don't forget," Stilson said.
In the past few years, he's shared a lot of it with Tolle and the rest of the family, but without recording the stories, they are likely to forget many of them.
"It doesn't seem like he had any of those really terrible things that a lot of soldiers had. He just never talked about it, until recently when we said we need to know more about World War II," Tolle said.
(Source: Sarah Brown, The New Era- 27/11/2019)
