An elderly gentleman approached the café table where my friend and I sat in a large, spacious atrium. How old do you think I am? He asked. Go ahead, you won’t insult me. How old do you think I am? My friend and I looked at one another. 68? she guessed Come on, he snapped back playfully. I would say 75, I added, though I thought he might be 80. Next month I’ll be 95 years old.
Thus began an hour-long storytelling session from a former decoder from World War II. Ever seen The Imitation Game? I worked with one of those guys. I’m still classified. Every mental faculty in this man was firing. He’d been to a private school recently to share some of his experiences with high school students. He was supposed to stay for an hour and they kept him for over two.
Albert [not his real name] had survived the Battle of the Bulge. He’d been involved with the Ghost Army—one of the greatest tactical deceptions in history (built by stagehands, he said) that was set up in Calais to draw Hitler’s attention away from Allied forces amassing to attack at Normandy. He told us the story of the man who never was, a fallen British soldier whose family agreed to let his body be dumped out to sea near the coast of Spain with a briefcase full of false information shackled to his wrist. The ruse worked when the German intelligence took the bait and believed an attack would be staged in Greece rather than Sicily.
Albert teared up when he spoke his injured buddies lying on the battlefield, knowing there was no way he could put them back together. He said he wanted the male students in his audience to know there was no shame in men crying.
My friend was the one who’d said yes when Albert asked to join us. I was more protective of our space. Yet the more he spoke, the more riveted I became. Something important—some kind of energy, right around the anniversary of D-Day—passed between us.
Somewhere in the middle of the conversation, he looked at me quite pointedly and said, there’s a voice inside each of us that says yes, no, maybe so. We need to listen to that voice. It’s very important; it’s almost a mystical thing.
Albert told us we would remember this conversation sometime in the future and that we were free to pass along any of his stories. More than his narrative, his presence lingers as I navigate my own inner battles, deceptions and encoded messages… Yes. No. Maybe so.