John Lindblom – Record-Bee staff
KELSEYVILLE ? With a million soldiers involved ? including 75,000 Americans who were killed, maimed or captured ? the nightmares from the Battle of the Bulge, formerly the Ardennes Offensive, fought 60 years ago, are legion.
Some nightmares, like that of widow Mary Sachse, a Rivieras resident, go on today.
Sachse”s husband, Ernest, the father of their seven children and a life mate for six decades, was not among the soldiers killed on the battlefield. But he was nonetheless a casualty of this “bloodiest of all battles.” His passing on May 21 four years ago came after a long and physically painful struggle with the complications of frostbite of his feet suffered in the arctic-like foxholes.
Mary watched the condition kill him a little at a time, shutting down this physical function and then that one until finally, in the final four years of his life, he became totally paralyzed.
“The domino effect,” as Mary describes it.
“One physical problem taxes his system and leads to another, which further taxes the system and leads to another, which further taxes the system and so on and so forth,” a doctor”s report said in describing Ernest”s slow descent into the hell of helplessness.
The report continued, “The peripheral vascular system is damaged, which leads to poor circulation, damages joints and leads to a strain on the circulatory system backing up all the way to the heart and major organs.”
The effect, the report said, “causes the immune system to turn on itself.”
Ernest suffered three aneurysms. The arthritis in his shoulders was so severe that he could barely raise his hands high enough to brush his teeth.
But the nightmare for Mary didn”t end with the death of her valorous, Bronze Star-awarded husband, because since then her life has been a disheartening, bureaucratic, bankrupting ordeal.
“I don”t understand it, I don”t understand it at all,” she says, sitting in the kitchen of the home she lives in now only because her children have stepped up to pay the mortgage.
What Mary wants and seems to be fully entitled to ? and what could have prevented all this anguish for the widow of an American hero ? is a form of pension called “dependent indemnity.” What she has gotten for these four years, she says, are delays, confusing instructions and bad advice. Hearings on her case have been scheduled, then delayed. Her letter of appeal to a congressman, she says, went unanswered.
The hang-up, she says, is that what really killed her husband is not on his death certificate. The certificate lists a “cardiorespiratory” condition as the cause of death, which does not make Mary eligible for benefits. It says nothing about the frostbite and the arthritis that resulted from it which really took Ernest down.
“They (veterans agencies) kept arguing,” says Mary. “They said arthritis wasn”t on the death certificate. And the things we sent in said nothing in regard to frostbite and it was 60 years ago when we went to the doctor who diagnosed it. But my husband was in foxholes where men froze to death with their arms in the air. If he didn”t get frostbite, he must have not been human.”
Mary acknowledges that matters might have moved along more swiftly if she had been more forceful.
“I was told I should be getting help because (Ernest) was in combat and because of his condition and because I, myself, am considered handicapped” ? due to circulatory problems in her legs ? “but I think my problem is I”m not assertive enough,” she says. “I sat back like a lady and waited.”
Nevertheless, she has pursued her case with local, state and federal veterans” agencies as have her seven children, including two daughters who are registered nurses.
“I have one friend who got her dependency indemnity and her husband wasn”t even injured in the service; he was in an auto accident,” Mary says. “Sometimes they (agencies) would just put my case aside. I didn”t make a nuisance of myself, but I let them know I was there.”
She wrote numerous letters providing information to support her case.
“I was told (by a local veterans” agency) that every time I sent a letter it delays the hearing,” Mary says. “But they also told me that if I had anything else to send it.
“I ended up going bankrupt,” she added. “One daughter hocked her home to pay off my van.”
An attorney from a Lakeport firm handling her bankruptcy, she says, told her that maybe the judge in her case wouldn”t notice the van.
” … But they did and they took my car away from me and I had to fight to get it back.”
The law firm, she says, helped her get the van back under a leasing arrangement, “but I had to sign papers that I wouldn”t sue when they got it back to me. I had a lawsuit (against the law firm). I should have sued, shouldn”t I?”
When Mary talks about her husband, she describes him as a “brilliant, tough, disciplined man.”
Ernest Sachse apparently never took the easy way. A college student, he gave up his deferment to enter the Army Air Corps in 1943. But he admired General George C. Patton and, after having already won his sergeant”s stripes, he transferred to the infantry. As an infantryman, he won a battlefield commission and would have been promoted to captain if he remained.
“Don”t ask me why he went into the infantry,” Mary shrugs.
Sachse had a career as a CBS engineer and was a consultant to George Lucas.
Mary says her case has finally reached the veteran”s agency in Washington, but she was told it will probably take months to be heard. One widow, she says, waited 19 years to receive her dependent indemnity.
“I feel like there”s a wall in front of me,” she says.
Contact John Lindblom at jlwordsmith@mchsi.com.
