Seventy years since the war ended—and continued

“In the decades after the war ended,” the late Lee Sandlin wrote in the unforgettable essay “Losing the War,” 

there probably wasn't a single night in which thousands of men across America didn't wake up sweating in terror—the patrol was about to set out again, the first alarms were arriving from the sentinels, the barrage was about to resume. The war was still being fought in a thousand glimpses of torment, in a million flickers of horror.

One of those men still fighting the war by night was my grandfather. That he was a war hero—twice shot down in a B-17 bomber, taken prisoner in Germany, awarded a Purple Heart and two Air Medals—I knew as long as I could remember. That he slept poorly I learned a little later, as I sat around his kitchen table, pre-dawn, while I ate pastries and he smoked. That he suffered from nightmares about the war I learned later still.