Tom Brokaw by The Greatest Generation

his father and what he meant to his neighbors. “Even after he retired,” he remembers, “people kept asking for him. A friend of mine was working for the power company when he blew his hands off in an accident. He was delirious. He kept screaming, ‘I want Dr. Van. Dr. Van will make this all right.’ ”
    Other physicians returning from similar combat experiences made their contributions to postwar America in other ways. Dr. William McDermott—another combat surgeon who went ashore in Normandy and operated in frontline tents across France, at the Battle of the Bulge, and into Germany—was a product of Exeter, Harvard, and a one-year residency at Massachusetts General Hospital before the war. He says of his war experiences, “It was horrible, but the salvation was that you were doing something—you weren’t just sitting there and watching the horror. We were always so damn busy and so tired, but I got an enormous amount of experience. It was like running a full-time emergency room twenty-four hours a day.”
    McDermott was involved in the liberation of one of the most notorious concentration camps, Ebensee. “You never in your life could imagine what it was like,” he says. “When I was treating kids in combat I didn’t have time to think, but the concentration camp was different. I went into a barracks and there were two men to every cot. They could barely move, but they got themselves up somehow and saluted me. I just about burst into tears. I stayed there for two weeks treating them, but two hundred died every day.”
    It was an experience that stayed with Dr. McDermott when he returned to the Boston area and began a long, distinguished medical career at Massachusetts General Hospital, Yale, Harvard, and New England Deaconess Hospital. In his eighties, he remains the chairman of the department of surgery at Deaconess and he’s the Cheever Professor of Surgery Emeritus at Harvard Medical School, where he was on the faculty for many years.
    Dr. McDermott has written several books, including a war memoir called
A Surgeon in Combat,
which recounts his experiences at Ebensee. That, in turn, led to a Boston meeting with a survivor of the camp, Morris Hollander, a Czech Jew. They may have met in the camp, although they couldn’t be sure. They did share the same lessons, however. One a Jewish inmate, the other a Roman Catholic doctor, they had both come to understand something about God and man in the barbarity of Ebensee.
    In a
Boston Globe
account of their meeting, Dr. McDermott said, “God is a God of necessity. He sets the morals. If people break them, that’s their issue, not God’s.” Hollander responded, “Exactly. . . . Every nation has the ability to do as Germany did.”
    Dr. McDermott says he remembers the horror of Ebensee to this day, but it remains for him primarily an intensely personal experience. “No,” he says, “I didn’t share this much with my medical students; I was a little restrained, but if the war came up during discussions, I would remind them of the levels to which humans can sink. It’s important for medical students to know those imperfections of the human race.”
    He also isn’t interested in returning to Germany. On one occasion after the war, he had to change planes in the Frankfurt airport, and he got involved in a typical reservations foul-up. In exasperation he said, “Listen, fifteen years ago we had a helluva lot easier time taking Frankfurt than I’m having getting out of Frankfurt now.” Dr. McDermott remembers with a short laugh that he got a first-class ticket back to Boston almost immediately.
    I N NORTH CAROLINA Dr. Van Gorder applied the lessons of his war experiences to his family of patients, and his philosophy was shared by his wife, Helen. After the death of their firstborn, Helen continued working as a nurse even as the family was wracked by the