Messengers of the Lost Battalion

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY MAR 3, 1997

To help come to terms with his father's life-and with his death in 1985 at the hands of his own daughter, the author's schizophrenic sister-Orfalea (Before the Flames) undertook this work. Service as a paratrooper in WWII was the older man's defining experience, yet he never spoke of it with his son. In exploring that experience, Orfalea reconstructs the story not only of his father but of one of America's lost battalions of WWII. Aref Orfalea served in the 551st Parachute Infantry, an independent battalion that first saw combat in the 1944 invasion of southern France. Committed to the Battle of the Bulge at the turn of the year, the 551st suffered such heavy casualties that it was disbanded. Orfalea brilliantly evokes the dynamics of a small elite unit, lost in a war of divisions, corps and armies. The battalion took its tone in particular from its charismatic and aggressive commander, Lieutenant-Colonel Wood Joerg, an archetype of the airborne officer, who died at the battalion's head in a suicidal attack on the German-held Belgian village of Rochelinval on January 7, 1945. The author's bewildered search for meaning in the expending of his father's battalion leads him to focus on General James Gavin, who is presented as having a kind of paternal relationship with the men of the 551st, at once loving and expecting too much of them. This interpretation seems unfounded, however. War is a process of destruction, and there was nothing exceptional in the fate of the 551st. Orfalea's account stands as a compelling witness to the consequences of that grim fact. Illustrations not seen by PW.