She wasn't born when the battles took place, but by the looks of it, Gigi Beatty was more emotional than anyone at the Company D reunion. At the end of a table at the Old Country Buffet in Catonsville a few weeks ago, the 53-year-old Pittsburgh native kept trying to put her feelings into words. Time after time, she broke down.
It wasn't so much recalling the World War II heroics of her late father, George Wagner Jr., that brought her to tears, though she's fiercely proud of him. In 1945, Wagner lost his spleen pulling a comrade in the Ozark Division's 405th Infantry out of the path of a German tank.
Nor was it that her dad, a machine-gunner, wasn't there to enjoy this, the 60th consecutive reunion of Company D, a heavy-weapons unit that played a key role in one of the war's most daring and pivotal operations, the crossing of the Roer River one frigid night that same year. Wagner, who survived the war, died in 1995.
No, as Beatty dabbed at her eyes with a paper napkin, stealing glances at the eight elderly men enjoying their suppers, she strained for the right words to describe what it meant to her to be seeing the end of an era.
"I started going to these [reunions] when I was a toddler," she said, her eyes red. "These guys were surrogate grandparents to my own children. ... We're one big, extended family.
"I'll never, ever forget what we've been celebrating all these years. It kills me to know this [reunion] is going to be the last one."
In 1945, after Allied forces had penetrated Adolf Hitler's defenses at Normandy, France, after they'd fended off the immense German offensive at the Battle of the Bulge, the Fuehrer resolved that the invaders would never conquer his "Fatherland." He set up ferocious defenses along the fabled "Siegfried Line" to defend Germany. That winter, men like the ones here at the Old Country Buffet effected the violent crossing of the frigid, roiling Roer River.
George Kessel recalls that night. He's the white-haired, gray-stubbled gentleman in the black-and-gold "Proud to Be A Veteran" cap, sipping the Diet Coke. At first, it's hard to envision the daring of a man who, 60 years ago, spent six months on the move behind enemy lines, spotting and charting enemy targets so his colleagues - the 100 or so men of Company D - could hit them with heavy mortar fire.
Kessel, 83, can't hear well anymore, but his memory is sharp as a bayonet's edge.
