The Invisible War

The Invisible War

My grandfather Oscar Felix Niesse was a 2nd generation German American whose parents came to America to fulfill the “American dream.” The Nies family left their homeland of Germany when my grandfather was ten and arrived in the US and settled in a small Midwestern town where they lived a simple peaceful life until World War II that thrust my grandfather back into his homeland ten years later to engage in a war that would change the course of history forever

After my grandfather graduated from high school he met and fell in love with grandmother Gustavia. They got married a year later and then my grandfather enlisted in the army and fought in part of World War II called the “Battle of the Bulge” between 1944 and 1945. This was the last major Nazi offensive against the Allies. My grandfather served with the 2nd Armored Division nicknamed “Hell on Wheels. “under Brigadier George S. Patton. The Division earned its nick name by General Patton, while witnessing it on Tennessee maneuvers conducted at intervals in the early 1940s. Patton reportedly said that the Division would be “Hell on Wheels” when it met the enemy. Some have said that there were two kinds of men in the 2nd armored division “Those who hated General Patton and those who loved him, but all of them would fight like hell for him.” The Battle of the Bulge was one of the largest and bloodiest battles of WWII. Approximately, 20,876 American soldiers were killed while another 42,893 were wounded.

The troops endured some of the toughest and most intense combat that pushed many of them to the brink of exhaustion, delirium, and even death. They had to fight in sub-zero temperatures which compounded the harsh fighting conditions. Many soldiers died of hypothermia and some of them developed frostbite and lost fingers/and or hands and toes/and or feet due to improper winter clothing and non-insulated boots that they were forced to wear. My grandfather loved his country and fought courageously earning himself two medals of Honor for his bravery, but serving his country was not his biggest battle instead wrestling with the invisible military demons of PTSD that he brought home during a time when no one knew what the PTSD was. During WWI Post Traumatic Stress Disorder was known as “shell shock,” and during WWII the term used was coined “combat or battle fatigue. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) first appeared as diagnoses in the American Psychiatric Association (APA) third edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental…

Related posts:

One article I read came from a book titled The Educator’s Guide to Emotional Intelligence and Academic Achievement: Social-Emotional Learning in the Classroom. The chapter I used in my research was…

A resident of Alameda, California, Suzanne Lindsey taught gifted students at the Mt. Diablo Unified School District and became an activist against nuclear power plant construction across Alameda…

If you work with buffered data such as Audio/Video Frame data, you have no doubt appreciated the features of Typed Arrays that came with ES2017 javascript. The ability to move, duplicate, manipulate…