Warrior finds courage to confront his past

Glen Douglas was 18 the first time he killed a man, a German soldier no older than himself.

As a combat veteran of World War II, Korea and Vietnam, Douglas has killed many more than he can ever remember, but he remembers this first firefight in the last weeks of the war in Europe. The German had shot at him from 35 feet away and missed.

“They say it’s either fight, flight or freeze, and I froze,” Douglas said recently. “Until my sergeant kicked me. Then I shot that German when he raised his head again. I shot him right between the eyes. His brains blew out, his helmet flew off and I gagged.

“This first one affected me, but it was easier after that.”

On Saturday, the Spokane combat veteran, one of the most decorated in Washington state, will attend the dedication of the World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C. It is expected to be the largest gathering of World War II veterans since the end of the war. The Smithsonian Institution has organized four days of events on the National Mall in honor of the 16 million men and women who served in the war, of which an estimated 4 million are still alive.

For Douglas, a 77-year-old Lakes-Okanagan Indian, the event will mark the end of a long journey through combat and recovery from the trauma it caused him. It has taken a warrior’s courage to confront his past this Memorial Day weekend. While in the nation’s capital, he will conduct an Indian ceremony of healing at each of the memorials for World War II, Korea and Vietnam.

Stealing to eat

Douglas was born near Penticton, B.C., and some of his earliest memories are of being out on trap lines with his father, who taught him the old ways of survival. He credits these early lessons with saving his life in the bitter cold of Korea and the jungles of Vietnam. Now an elder of his people, Douglas said he clung to his heritage despite the efforts of the Canadian and U.S. governments to take it away by sending him to residential school.

Beginning in 1842, the Catholic and Protestant religious orders that ran these residential schools across North America forced the assimilation of Indian children into white society by eradicating their culture, heritage, language and spirituality through segregation and corporal punishment. Many of these children suffered physical, sexual and psychological abuse.

Douglas was 12 when he was taken away from his family in a cattle truck that went from house to house collecting Indian boys and girls. He said Royal Canadian Mounted Police were present when he was taken from his home and sent to the Kootenay Residential School in Cranbrook, B.C. He said he was abused there by the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, Roman Catholic priests and brothers.

“They brought in different tribes,” he said. “We were beaten for speaking our language. We weren’t allowed to talk to our brothers at all. They were beating the devil out of me.”

Douglas said he also regularly experienced starvation at the school, eating beans and wormy oatmeal while the “priests and nuns ate meat and potatoes.” He said he survived by stealing vegetables from the school’s root cellar and cattle feed from the dairy barn. He recalled helping to lower a small boy into the root cellar through a ventilation shaft. This food was distributed by the older children, making sure the younger ones got a share.

He asked his father to take him out of the school and was told, “I can’t. It’s the law. You have to go there.”

Experts in post-traumatic stress disorder believe two main factors affect how soldiers cope with the trauma of war – severity of combat and childhood experience. Douglas believes what happened to him at boarding school set him up for torment long after his military career ended.

“I was really angry. I experienced beatings by the black robes, and I was determined never to be a victim again,” he said.

The toughest outfit

When he was 14, he was sent to live with his uncle on the Colville Reservation near Oroville, Wash. It was the custom of his people to loan children out to relatives, and his uncle, whose children were grown, needed Douglas on his ranch.

When he was 17, he asked his uncle to come with him to the draft board in Okanogan, Wash. He was determined to join the U.S. Army “so I would never be abused again.” His uncle refused to lie about the boy’s age, but just being there was enough to help convince the board that Douglas was old enough to serve. He said he received his notice a week later, and reported to Fort Lewis, Wash., in May 1944.

He was sent to boot camp at Camp Roberts in the California desert, Douglas said, a place “so hot the devil gave it to the Army.” He underwent advance training there, too, and it was during this time “the paratroopers came and said they were the toughest outfit,” so he volunteered.

He was at jump school in Fort Benning, Ga., when the Rangers came “and said they were the toughest,” so he volunteered again. He underwent 10 weeks of accelerated training – jungle training in Florida, mountain training in Colorado, desert training in California.

Crossing the Atlantic in February 1945, his troop ship was in a convoy that lost three ships to mines or German submarines along the way. He remembers seeing the glow of these ships burning through the fog and dark, but he was never told how the ships were sunk, whether they were carrying supplies or troops or how many men were lost. He had been told a man would not last more than 12 minutes in the frigid sea, and he was scared his ship would be hit, too, until he arrived in France.

“To this day I find it difficult even being in a ferry,” Douglas said. “I felt so helpless.”

His unit, part of B Company, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 1st Battalion, had just caught up with the 101st Airborne Division after it crossed the Meuse River in Belgium in March 1945. The 101st, he said, was chasing the German army when his unit passed through Dachau soon after it was liberated.

During its drive into southern Germany, the 101st uncovered Kaufering IV, one of 11 camps administered by the Dachau concentration camp, according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. When the 12th Armored Division and the 101st Airborne arrived at Kaufering IV on April 27 and 28, they found some 500 dead inmates and ordered local townspeople to bury them.

The stench of death was everywhere, Douglas said. It would have been impossible for the townspeople not to know what was happening.

“That’s when my whole life changed,” Douglas said. “Dachau changed my outlook on life, about how people treat other people.”

War’s end

The 101st continued fighting and ended up at “The Eagle’s Nest,” Hitler’s summer residence near Burtchesgartens. Douglas was 18 when his father caught up with him by correspondence. He had been drafted, although voluntarily, without parental permission, Douglas said, and the Army granted him an early discharge at his father’s request on Oct. 19, 1945.

Soon after he returned to the United States, he re-enlisted and was sent back to Germany as part of the occupational army. He was in the U.S. Constabulary, manning checkpoints, patrolling borders and catching smugglers.

“As late as 1947 we had firefights with the SS hiding out in the Alps,” he said. “If they had not fired on us, we wouldn’t have known they were there.”

In 1946, Douglas was sent to non-commissioned officer school in Freising, Germany, close to Dachau.

“I never wanted to go back there even after they cleaned it up,” he said. To this day, certain images or smells will send him back in time to a place he cannot forget.

He left Europe in 1948, a staff sergeant. He had survived his baptism of fire in history’s greatest conflict, but he would soon confront another enemy in Asia.

Tomorrow: Douglas distinguishes himself under fire in Korea.