Nineteen Forty-Five: A Secret Mission Outside the Frontlines

2021 Silver Medal IPPY Awards Winner for Best Regional Fiction!

Rusty barbed wire and distant AM radio—Montana hid my secrets for fifty years.

Then a young reporter arrived in a beat-up Impala. Her assignment, WWII Homecoming Memories, had uncovered a puzzling lead about several dead men last seen with a red-headed nurse. I could have lied, but she reminded me of myself at that age so I rolled a cigarette and told her all of it.

She spilled coffee on my table.

Her research started in New York. In choosing soldiers to profile, she included her hometown and discovered her great uncle, reported MIA in 1944, bought a train ticket to Browning, Montana, three months after they buried his empty casket. Impossible, yet on two consecutive pages, she counted 14 tickets to Browning—a village on the Blackfeet Reservation. The National Archives showed that 13 of those men shared the same distinct status: Missing in Action.

I know where those passengers are.

Southwest of Browning, where the plains run into the Rockies, stands a church. Once it represented everything good in our country, a tiny church built in 1913 by a young man for his wedding. Only four people attended the bride’s funeral in 1918. Her twin babies slept through the service. Eight months earlier her husband marched into World War I and he never returned.

My story starts and ends at that little church, but in between, the darkest hours of mankind churned through Europe. Some of that darkness found its way to Montana. As bad as it ended, I wondered if the Lord forgives murder. As it turns out, sometimes yes, sometimes definitely no.