VE Day: homage to lives lost

PRIVATE JEROME Schary made the newspapers but once, not in a wedding announcement, but in a small, all-too-common 1945 news item headlined ''Latest War Casualties." That clipping and a couple of snapshots are what have come down to me as the last surviving member of his family.

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From it I learn that he shipped out as an air cadet, was attached to the 508th Reinforcement Company in the European Theater of Operations, and reached Germany on VE Day. Jerome was an only child, so doubtless that May 8, 1945, the day the European war ended, meant extra joy for his parents. They could sleep again at night.

But less than three weeks later, the War Department would inform them that their 26-year-old soldier was dead, killed in a plane crash in the fields of France.

Thus Jerome does not count as one of the 292,114 combat deaths of American troops during the war. Instead he belongs to another statistic, the 115,185 noncombat fatalities. Including wounded and missing in action, total US World War II troop casualties reached over a million. Jerome perished cruelly when safety had ostensibly arrived, when Nazism had made an unconditional surrender, when the world could start to breathe again. Did that render his untimely, senseless end all the more bitter?

I am the sole human being to remember that Jerome Schary lived, and I know him only from his slim tombstone in a New York cemetery. ''He died in the service of his country," its engraving says. ''Our precious son." Beside him lies the double grave of his mother and father, whose child was snatched from their old age.

The brittle half-torn clipping tells me ''Private Jerome (Jerry) Schary attended James Madison High School in Brooklyn [and] the University of Virginia." In the photo published with the death notice his bright eyes smile into the camera, soldier's cap perched at a jaunty angle. I look at the young man's picture and wonder, was he on the basketball team at James Madison? Did he have a sweetheart, a Virginia girl he met at college? Did he go to Coney Island on the Fourth of July? Whistle songs along with the radio? Or watch the way the wind whips the clouds over the Hudson River on a winter afternoon?

But nobody knows anything any more about Jerry Schary. Lying for 60 years in a silent corner of a cemetery, he has left no traces. Of the 16 million who served in the US armed forces during World War II, he is among the unlucky ones who did not return from the conflagration, he and the others to whom the Statue of Liberty bid only farewell.

Trying to find out more about the 508th Reinforcement Company, I turned to search the Internet. What I did find was the 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment, part of the 82d Airborne Division, whose campaigns included battling in Anzio, landing in Normandy on D-Day, participating in the Battle of the Bulge, and fighting its way into Germany. On a link called Roll of Honor, I scrolled down page after page through columns of alphabetized names of enlisted men: Choate, Christensen, Clancy, Karavan, Karney, Kellogg, Mangus, Martin, Martinez, Ramesa, Ramsey, Ranabauer, and their officers: Jampetero, Jatros, Johnson, Maternowski, Mathias, Meadows. Listed beside each name is the soldier's rank and unit.

Then the columns that made me gasp at the sheer numbers, over half a century after the fact: the date and location of each one's death, and the cemetery where each is buried. 9,386 American servicemen are interred in the military cemetery in Normandy, France; 7,989 in Henri Chapelle, Belgium; 5,076 in Luxembourg; 7,989 in Ardennes, Belgium; 8,301 in Margraten, Netherlands; 3,812 in Cambridge, England. Still more were returned for burial to their home states.

That's what war brings: an end of the road, a stunted premature finish for young lives whose loss diminishes the world. As the anniversary of VE Day nears, we shall do them the honor of paying homage, these casualties whom time has turned into unknown soldiers.

Helen Schary Motro, a member of Tel Aviv University's faculty of law, is author of the forthcoming ''Maneuvering between the Headlines: An American Lives through the Intifada."