Second Chance: In Combat with the Us 'Texas' Infantry, the OSS, and the French Resistance During the Liberation of France, 1943-1946

Despite the huge proliferation of books about almost every conceivable aspect of World War II, few accounts manage to recreate the personal experience of war in a combat zone. Each veteran brought his own memoir with him, ricocheting around in his head, but few have had the combination of literary skill, self-knowledge, and desire to get it down on paper. Private Steve Weiss of the 36th Texas Infantry, U.S. Army, is one of the few who had that elusive combination, and even so, it took him almost a lifetime to put it all together. In Second Chance: In Combat with the US Texas Infantry, the OSS, and the French Resistance during the Liberation of France, 1943-1946, Weiss, a psychotherapist who possesses a doctorate in War studies, sheds much of that aspect of his life to explore the kid who hit the beaches of Southern France in 1944. Although this part of the memoir could easily make a rousing adventure story - Weiss and his buddies, separated from their unit, spend time with the French Resistance and the OSS and Weiss winds up with a Croix de Guerre from the former and a silver plaque from the latter - the author is too honest to make it just a series of clips from a Hollywood movie. Almost constant anxiety, clumsiness in operating among dangerous men who speak a language he speaks and understands imperfectly, participating in a botched execution of a French collaborator - all of these stories come across the authentic voice of a kid trying to be tougher and more worldly than he was - or is. Once transferred back to the infantry and sent to the killing grounds in Germany, Weiss lives through a nightmare rather than an adventure - he and others desert, he gets court-martialed, sent to prison, is helped by a sympathetic psychologist, and winds up as an Army photographer. All of these decidedly un-heroic actions receive the same unblinkingly honest treatment, as do his post-war peregrinations as a photographer of generals and movie stars and a poignant love affair with a French woman. At the end of Second Chance, the older Weiss, by now the only American to have received the Medaille de la Resistance Francaise and hold the rank of Officier in the French Legion of Honor, looks up many of the people he met during the war, from Resistance comrades to the officers whose incompetence contributed to his decision to desert. Some are changed and some are dead, but all are bound by a shared experience of war that transcends the decades and even mortality itself. Few memoirs convey both the sordidness and exaltation of life in war more honestly than Second Chance. It succeeds as an historical and psychological study, one of value to any serious student of the human side of war.