One veteran’s longest day

BY STEVE JANOSKI

The red cover is faded and tattered, its gold lettering slowly beginning to wear to the point of illegibility.

The pages have taken on a yellow hue, and small, dark smudges of fingerprints — dirt? blood? — festoon the corners.


It sits quietly on the table, with its owner of nearly seven decades having recently departed this world after 88 years, with the story of how it came into his possession known to but a few.

Frank T. Semeraro was born in 1922. Following the death of his mother, he had to quit school early to work on his father's garbage truck, and came up in a hardscrabble Paterson existence in the earliest decades of the American Century.

His father had been wounded while serving in the Italian Army during the Great War, and had left that country just as Mussolini's shadow began to rise over Rome. As the storm of World War II began to gather, he was positive of one thing: he didn't want his son to go to war.

But, as the long fingers of fascism began to wrap around the globe, there would be few families who remained untouched, few children that remained unscathed. The Semeraro home on McBride Avenue was to be no different.

After the Dec. 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, the young Semeraro, like so many others, decided that he was going to go to war.

He planned to join the US Navy so he could fight the Japanese, but an ill-fated fishing trip left him so seasick that he reconsidered that course.

He decided to leave it up to the government, and figured that when they drafted him, they'd send him where they needed him. When the US Army called in 1943, it decided that he was needed in Europe, and so after boot camp, Semeraro was sent to England.

As 1943 wore on into the following year, rumors abounded over whether, where, and when the Allies would make their great landing on the European mainland to begin the final stage of the great battle to save civilization.

The plans for the landing, ominously named Operation Overlord by high command, were unknown to the troops on the ground…until the day that the call came.

And as they herded troops into the transports sitting along the coast of the English Channel on the morning of June 6, 1944, Semeraro wasn't sure where he was headed, but he knew that whatever was happening, it was big.

The seas were rough that day, and men vomited as the boats shook; a result, no doubt, of a brutal combination of seasickness and devastated nerves.

As they closed on the French beach, it's likely that the scene that greeted Semeraro was one straight from the depths of hell — steel abatis, known as "Czech hedgehogs," strewn across the sand as the great cement pillboxes of Hitler's fearsome Atlantic Wall rose into the heavens — but there was little time to take in the sight, for as they neared the shore, his landing craft was struck by a shell.

In an effort to save their lives, troops began streaming over the sides and into the water. Semeraro did the same, but realized quickly that his comrades, weighed down by their heavily-loaded packs, were sinking straight to the bottom and drowning.

Fearing this would be his fate, he pulled his knife and cut off his pack before desperately swimming for shore. Once there, however, there seemed to be no respite from the flurry of German bullets — until he saw one man waiving him over.

The man was another American soldier, and had already dug out a small foxhole to provide cover. When Semeraro reached him, the soldier began giving him his rations, weapon, and the like.

"I've got to get back to the boats, I need medical attention," the man told him. It was then he noticed that the soldier was holding his stomach and intestines together with his hands.

"Just wait for the others," he told Semeraro.

Before he left though, he handed him a small, red prayer book, Army issue, 1943, with its title, "A Spiritual Almanac for Service Men," printed across the front in golden letters.

"You're gonna' need this," he said, before disappearing back to the ships, never to be seen again.

Semeraro stayed in that foxhole as long as he could on D-Day, listening to the gruesome bark of the German MG-42s as they mowed down American troops and turned the Channel's water red with their blood.

He held onto that prayer book later on as he fought his way off the beach and through the pillboxes and trenches of the Atlantic Wall, and then through the hedgerows of Normandy, where the Germans fought tooth and nail to try to keep the Allies from breaking out.

It stayed with him through the rest of his service, and after the war, too, as he established a family construction company, married, had children, then grandchildren, and then great-grandchildren.

The world would eventually come to know the ghastly horror of that day, and that beach — Omaha Beach — would come to join the ranks of places like Verdun, Antietam, and Iwo Jima as being amongst the most infamous killing fields in history.

And when "Grandpa Semeraro" (as he was known to all of us) passed away on Oct. 6, he joined all of the other spirits of the Greatest Generation who are slowly passing on to eternity, forever to be remembered as those valiant few who faced down true evil, and saved the world from unimaginable darkness.

This story was related to me by his grandson, Frank T. Semeraro, who is proud to share his grandfather's name.

E-mail: janoski@northjersey.com


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Bin Laden's backhanded victory

STEVE JANOSKI

When I drive through the heart of my state on the ever-chaotic Route 3 and the New York City skyline rises up in the hazy distance, it just doesn't look right without them.

I have never gotten used to the sight. At this point, I doubt I ever will.

The memories from that day are vivid — huddled around the cab of an old Chevy S-10 on our lunch period, listening to the car radio in astonishment as announcers caterwauled between updates on the Twin Towers and warnings about further attacks.

We may as well have been crowded around an arch-topped table radio listening to the first reports on Pearl Harbor as far as I was concerned.

"Jesus Christ," I said between pulls of a cigarette. "We're going to war with… somebody."

New York was our city, my city, the place I'd been brought every weekend since I was old enough to walk, and now it sat shrouded in a billowing fog of destruction that had been catapulted into the air as the ashes of firefighters and office workers mixed with the chalky dust of 220 floors' worth of sheetrock.

The psychological effect it all had on me was incalculable.

Ten years later, I suppose that gazing at that lacking skyline is the ultimate solemn reminder that nothing in life is permanent and that we are not all the heroes of our own movies.

Some of us go quietly, some gallantly, some with a whisper and some with a roar, but in the end, we all die, and every time it's a tragedy.

And sometimes the things we've built up around ourselves, our bridges and our skyscrapers and our countries, they die too — 9/11 taught us that much, and nothing has been quite the same since we learned that lesson.

And I don't mean that in the "9/11 changed everything!" way that some politicians do when they're seeking approval to invade this country or that country, but more that in 2001, America was robbed of its characteristic optimism, and without that, it seems to be hurtling toward a devastating end.

For years after 9/11, we turned into a crooked-back ogre, glaring with untrusting eyes and balled fists at every nation, a recalcitrant bully all too ready to call for war in the deserts of the Middle East or on the floors of our own Congress.

The scars are still there — now, a decade later, we are reluctant to help the people of the Middle East as they brawl in the streets for their own liberty, which we supposedly championed back then.

And 10 years later, we are not better off.

On the best of days, the country is going bankrupt, the infrastructure is crumbling, and our foreign wars are bleeding us dry. On the worst, we are told it's our last day on the job, that the rivers are rising, or that the bank is foreclosing.

Still, we have not learned. We call for war to prevent war, we build more to prevent flooding, we elect people who hate government to fix government; as a country, we seem in dire need of a logic class or two.

Sometimes, for all of our flight deck rhetoric about how we "stand strong" and "never forget," I wonder if Bin Laden actually succeeded.

Maybe, just maybe, he figured out that his strikes would foment a need for revenge that would so thoroughly consume America that it would recklessly charge down the path to massive debt and a crippled economy just for the chance to kill him, willingly suffocating itself in pursuit of "victory."

Maybe he knew us better than we thought — maybe, better than we knew ourselves.

Or maybe I've just lost that September 10 optimism I once had.

Email: janoski@northjersey.com