Exactly seventy years ago this season, Nelson Bryant of West Tisbury was in Europe, having dropped by parachute into German-occupied Holland. “On December 17, my regiment was
ordered to prepare for immediate movement to the Bulge and I was apprehensive as we rushed to gather weapons, ammunition, clothing, and K-rations,” he wrote in his new memoir, Mill Pond Joe.

“I had wanted to jump into Normandy and Holland, but the thought of more combat, particularly in winter, depressed me.”

Just as it always was in his long career as the outdoors columnist for The New York Times,
Bryant’s writing style in Mill Pond Joe is deceptively straightforward and spare. But its tightly
mitered construction only makes its visual power more haunting.

“An image of our entry into the fray sticks with me. We had gotten out of our trucks and were slogging along a steep-sided road through a  forest that was packed with snow – snow that muted the sound of small arms fire ahead of us – sometimes clambering aside as one of our light tanks or armored vehicles passed us, and in one half-mile stretch we went past the bodies of several American soldiers who had been shot, fallen in the road, and then run over and mutilated by our own vehicles. Death and chaos reigned.

“A week or so later my company had moved a few miles back from the front for a few days of much-needed rest. We were scattered about in small groups in a snow-filled spruce forest and relishing the opportunity to build wood fires for warmth and cooking, something that couldn’t be done on the front lines because the smoke marked your location for the enemy. One of my buddies and I were having our first sips of hot coffee made from melted snow and instant coffee (from our K-ration packets) when we heard several gunshots that seemed close by.

“A minute or so later one of our officers and two enlisted men rushed past, weapons at the ready. As they disappeared into the forest the officer shouted something about a German patrol having  blundered into our rest area.

“My buddy grabbed his rifle and followed them. It took me a couple of minutes to do the same.

I had taken off my leather jump boots to dry them out over the fire. Following the tracks of my companion in the snow, I came upon a wounded German soldier lying on his back, with three of his dead comrades nearby. I knelt beside him. His eyes were open. I could speak no German and he no English, but he weakly motioned for me to reach into his pocket where there was a wallet with a photograph of a smiling young woman in a summer dress. Her name and address as well as a note to him were on the back of the photo. Somehow, via head nodding and hand signals, I realized that he wanted me to take the photograph, and write her of where and how he had died.

“I nodded that I would honor his wish. He watched me put the photograph in my pocket, then died. I lost the photo in the miserable days that followed.”

There is a deep undercurrent of remorse in Bryant’s book, and not just a seven-decade-old
nagging feeling that he let down an enemy soldier in a moment beyond all the battles. But there is also a tireless optimism and sense of wonder, born, I like to think, from nearly a century of life actively connected to the natural world here on the Vineyard and off-Island. The tide that goes out will swell again, and though all creatures must die, sometimes violently, there are always new things under the sky to be seen, felt, tasted, or heard by those who make the time to go and find them.

It’s a comforting piece of wisdom as we head into our fourteenth winter of war. Peace may be lost, like a picture of a pretty girl in a summer dress, but it refuses to be forgotten.