Photographer Page

Stacy Pearsall

Gerald White was on kitchen duty during the battle when he was told to burn some trash. “It blew up in my face—totally blinded me,” he says. The blindness lasted for three days, and his face still bears the scars.

Like most Battle of the Bulge veterans, Vernon Brantley was reluctant to talk about his war experiences. “For the first 10 years after the war,” he says, “if some guy started telling you about his battlefield exploits, it was 95 percent certain that he was BS-ing you.”

Guarding the railroad tracks of an embattled village on Christmas Day, Chris Carawan noticed a barrel leaking something through a bullet hole. “It was wine!” he says. “So we all filled our helmets and had a Christmas toast.”

As a paratrooper, Leif Maseng dodged death behind enemy lines. “Here’s what it really came down to,” he says. “Do what you can to stay alive, and see if you can kill some Germans along the way.”