A Blog of Flashbacks

Lost Souls

June 2026

Somewhere in the recent history of this country we have lost the souls of many of our military. In old Russia, a person was often referred to as a soul. A man owned not so many serfs, but so many souls. We have come to use that term when people die. Six souls were lost when F/V Arctic Ranger went down. Thirty-one souls were lost in Afghanistan in August 2011. Twenty-eight souls were lost in the Sandy Hook tragedy. Since Vietnam, however, we have a new tragedy: the lost souls of too many who return from battle soul-wounded and wandering.

When I was four, I wore my red wool coat, hat, and leggings one winter day. I must have begged my father to let me sit by the door as he drove. As my father, his business friend, and I got into the car, I remember the two men joking about sitting close because I wanted the seat by the door. I remember being told to be careful of my hands when I closed the door. Oh yes, I assured him, knowing he had just spoiled me. My mother never would have let me sit on the outside. Carefully I leaned out, putting my left hand by the dashboard as I pulled the door closed with my right. Very methodically, I shut all my left fingers in the door. I’m sure I screamed, and the man next to me leaned to open the door immediately.

The closest hospital was Cushing Army Hospital. It was 1945. Imagine arriving at an army hospital with a crying little girl all dressed in red. I was hovered over by a half dozen men in pajamas and robes, and more stood in the background. The only man I’d even seen in pajamas was my father, and here I was looking at a hallway of pajamaed men. Some couldn’t talk right. They all looked very ancient to me. Most likely they were younger than my forty-year-old father. My mother and aunt worked as Red Cross Gray Ladies there; now I got to see where they went each week. I was a novelty, a clean, well-dressed little girl with blonde curly hair who reminded them of their own daughters at home. All they wanted was to be close to the brightness of innocence, to wash away the horrors and nightmares of war. I think they comforted and charmed me out of my tears as my father and his friend faded into the background. Perhaps someone put some little bandages on my fingers, necessary for the tears but not the injury. When all was done, I wanted to tell my father we couldn’t leave those men, I needed to stay there, continue to make them happier than they were when we walked in. At the age of four, of course, I made no such suggestion.

Lost souls. Souls lost somewhere on the battlefields of Europe and the Pacific waters. Souls lost in the fields of Vietnam and now in Iraq and Afghanistan. I hope we had fewer lost souls in World War II, because our nation supported that war. We did not support Vietnam or those sent there. Now our military is only 2 percent of the population, and most people don’t know someone who has served. I thought I was brought up not knowing about war, but that is not true. Two cousins had husbands in World War II, and one of them died. I went to Cushing Hospital. We heard the war news on the radio every day as I, the youngest, sat curled in my father’s lap. Boatloads of soldiers came into Boston Harbor during and after the war. How could I not know? How could I not feel empathy for those sad looking men? We have lost souls wandering out of uniform. Those who are still healthy we hire and reward. The others we ignore.

This is a passage in my book, The Soul of My Soldier (Familius, 2016). I have more thoughts and feelings to add to it.

World War II impacted my life too. We listened to the news from Europe and the Pacific. I remember listening in August 1945 when the surviving navy men from the USS Indianapolis were found floating in the Pacific. As an adult, at a Friday afternoon weekly gathering of Gustavus folks, someone asked about my book, The Soul of My Soldier. Had I finished it? Yes. She then asked if I’d heard of the cruiser USS Indianapolis. Again, I answered yes. Chills. She then said her father was one of the 316 survivors of the 1,197 crew. Chills. He and the other survivors had floated in the Pacific waters for four days and five nights. More chills. Yes, I’m now writing about that. Clarence Benton, the Chief Fire Control man lives inside me.

My professor, Odgen Lindsley, was my teacher, mentor, friend, family acquaintance, and fellow New Englander. He was more than that too: he was an airman in a war. As his widow, Nancy, described Ogden’s plane crash in July 1944 to me today, I had a very emotional reaction. I felt chilled, lonely, and depressed. I think I flashed back to being a two- three- and four-year-old sitting in my father’s lap listening to war news no child should hear, let alone live. I am aware I am not one of those children in an area subjected to bombings, shootings, soldiers running door to door. I was a child, evidently a sensitive one, listening to the war news snuggled in the comfort of my father’s hug.

Returning from a bombing run over the oil fields in Ploesti, Romania, Ogden’s Army Air Corps plane, a B-24 named Tangerine, became crippled over the Croatian coastal mountains. The pilot ordered the crew, “Bail out!”

A B-24 bomber like the one that crashed in Croatia.

Today Nancy describes her reaction, “Standing in the Croatian field, where Tangerine, devoid of crew, crashed 75 years earlier, was a most emotional moment for me. I visualized that massive plane overhead skidding over the treetops, low across the field, and hitting a mountainside head-on and exploding.”

Nancy was born while Ogden was a POW. She continued, “Ogden noted my birthday and said he thought January 23, 1945, might have been the date the Stalag Luft IV column started the long march west. When Ogden met the Tangerine pilot 50 years later, he asked why he hadn’t ditched in the Adriatic, they were in sight of it. The pilot said when he had ditched a plane a few months before, the cowling fell on the navigator and killed him. He didn’t want to repeat that. As it was, two of the crew died bailing out in this rugged terrain, one dangling from his parachute snagged on the cliff wall. The other disappeared into a ravine and his body was not found until after the war had ended. Ogden, knocked unconscious after slamming into rocks, came to with numerous non-life-threatening injuries after he slammed into rocks - but on the side of the mountain, not a cliff. The pilot, the last to bail out, was very badly injured with compound fractures to both legs. The plane came to land in a field, skidded across a cultivated field and crashed into a rock cliff and exploded. There are still pieces everywhere. Not only was it a tragedy for the crew, but the farmer lost his whole wheat crop that late July day. The family has owned the property for 400 years and welcomed us into their home. The current farmer was a small child, but he remembers the surviving Tangerine crew limping or being carried into their village. Men too old to fight offered the Americans their homemade alcohol, a Croatian custom. The Croatian farmers drank first, thus reassuring the Americans it was not poisoned. In short order, Germans arrived in a truck and took the injured crew as prisoners of war.”

Ogden Lindsley, 6” 2”, 115 pounds, in a British uniform after his escape from Stalag IV in early 1945.

Imagine seeing pieces of the plane that impacted the lives of its crew, one of who became your husband.

Imagine being a Palestinian, a Sudanese, an Iranian, or a Ukrainian.

Will we ever learn war is not the answer?

The first part, “Lost Souls,” of this is from The Soul of My Soldier (2015). Sanger, CA: Familius. There is also another chapter about Ogden, finally being in touch with the pilot 58 years after the plane crash. That chapter is titled “Sleeping through the Night.” What triggered me to write this book was being the wife of a three-tour Army veteran.