Vernon Brantley Memories of the Battle of the Bulge were banished from Vernon Brantley’s mind. Like many WWII veterans, especially those serving in America’s longest engagement, he’d tried to forget war–time experiences.

But his proud children, in a loving conspiracy with Brantley’s wife Doris, gathered his medals and located a map depicting the tiny, but very important crossroads at Granmenil, Belgium, where he served during the coldest Ardenesse winter in a half–century. Since his family surprised him with the framed collection, he has been reminded of that battle every time he walks past the military memorabilia hanging in his Northeast Columbia home.

Memories have surfaced more recently, during months of continual contact and communication with other veterans, serving with him on the local committee planning the national Veterans of the Battle of the Bulge reunion hosted in Columbia this week. And he knows, as he and his wife Doris help staff the hospitality room at the Marriott Hotel, he will hear war stories from visiting veterans; the entire experience will come flooding back.

He is ready. In fact, he sat down and wrote out the details.

“Our mission was to establish roadblocks to prevent German tanks from over–running our own outposts and front lines. We had 24 anti–tank mines, attached by rope as a “daisy chain,” as we called them, to pull across the road in front of their treads. I was driving the jeep when one of our own troops stepped onto the road and advised us of a very dangerous stretch under direct observation of the Germans,” said Brantley, trained as both topographical draftsman and driver. “He advised us, to get through, we should wait until the Germans had fired one or two rounds of shells and then go like he before they reloaded. Cautiously, we waited as instructed.”

Suddenly, Brantley recalled, “I saw, or felt a puff of white smoke. No noise. No pain. Not until I came to some time later. We’d been blown off the road; the jeep overturned pinning me and Sgt. Lee Jordan underneath. The snow drifts must have cushioned us, most likely saved our lives. The others were thrown clear.”

After being shuttled to several make–shift aid stations and finally through several hospitals, Brantley was able to return to his unit. That’s when he learned he’d been “Missing in Action” all that time. “Records must have been lost when the aid station was overrun, captured, or they had to move out quickly to prevent capture.” While he’d been hospital- ized, his replacement as well as the platoon leader had been killed. “They had been straffed by an apparently friendly plane, identified as British Spitfire.”

After V–E day, Brantley was sent to one of the deployment camps. “We called them cigarette camps because they had names like Chesterfield and Lucky Strike. We all figured we were on our way to Japan when the atomic bomb was dropped.”