The Paper Trail

Seeing a photograph of his parents together for the first time, Lang said, "It looked to me like they were full of optimism and starry-eyed. I don't think she ever got over George being killed. I know she carried him in her heart. She was definitely devoted to my stepfather, but she never got over that."

Growing up, Lang said, he only rarely saw the pictures of his father that his mother kept carefully tucked away. "I remember I always thought he was a handsome man, and I wondered why I wasn't as handsome," he said. "I had freckles and buck teeth, and I was gangly, and I'd look at a picture of him and wonder, 'What in hell happened to me?' "

His mother, he said, suffered from depression and alcoholism late in her life and died in 1981 at age 58.

Lang's own attitude about the military had been colored by the Vietnam War. He attended Florida State University but left because of poor grades in the early 1960s and faced being sent to Vietnam. Lang said he was tempted to seek a deferment that was available to him as the sole surviving son of a war casualty. His adoptive father, a World War II Navy veteran, encouraged him, saying, "Your father was killed, and I certainly did my share, and I don't really think much of this war . . . So, stay in school." Lang returned to FSU and graduated in 1968.

It was only within the last year, Lang said, long after his adoptive father had died and his house was cleaned out, that Lang received some of his mother's keepsakes, including scrapbooks of George Oertel's military training days. Motivated by my phone call to sift through them, Lang said, he was not aware how many things she had kept, including the actual Purple Heart, which was in its original box. The nation's oldest military honor, created by George Washington in 1782, it is a beautiful purple-and-gold medal with a purple ribbon. It is inscribed "For Military Merit. George C. Oertel Jr."

His mother had saved the Western Union telegram that arrived at the Hopping home in Northwest Washington on July 30, 1944, at 4:08 p.m.: "The Secretary of War desires me to express his deep regret . . ." Also among her papers was a letter from Maj. Hale, the chaplain, in December 1944, expressing sorrow over Oertel's death and explaining the specific circumstances: "He was a platoon leader of one of our weapons platoons and was moving his machine guns into position on the afternoon of that day. As he was leading his men around a building, an enemy shell scored a direct hit on the side of the building and he was killed instantly by shell fragments."

His mother had also kept a letter from an Italian family who had befriended George and several other officers when they were stationed for several months near Naples in early 1944. "I do not have words to express the sorrow we felt at the loss of dear George," wrote Maria Bucarelli of the town of Bagnoli on August 7, 1945. She mentioned how George had gone to confession and communion with her family, and how they spent Easter together having a grand Italian dinner.

"You gave George a beautiful gold cigarette case, and he always carried it in his pocket . . . It was like a symbol of the love that bound him to his dear wife," she wrote. The case had gotten broken and would not close, she said, but her husband had fixed it and returned it to George. "I can't tell you how happy George was . . . He loved you very much and treasured your gift."

Bucarelli wrote that George and the other officers remarked about how much they liked the area, and that "after the war they wanted to come back to Italy as tourists with their wives and children." She also thanked Louise Oertel for sending photographs. "We were very glad to see the picture of you and little Sandy. How beautiful Sandy is!"

Also among Louise Oertel's papers was a handwritten "Dear Lou" letter sent by her father, Brig. Gen. Hopping, from our Silver Spring home, postmarked April 3, 1946. He wrote: "We enjoy your letters so much. We miss you and Sandy so much. The house seems empty without him. I keep looking for him to run up to me with his beautiful smile." The general, who was quite handy, also noted that he had finished the cellar and "the screened porch adds a lot to the appearance of the house." He couldn't write a longer note, he said, because he'd just received his orders for the Pacific and had to start packing.

Sandy Lang smiled when I showed him two photographs that I had gotten from his cousin Danny, which were taken inside our house in 1946. One shows his mother striking a Hollywood starlet pose in front of our fireplace, and the other shows 2-year-old Sandy being cuddled by his maternal grandparents, whom he described as very gentle, loving people.

Soon after the Hoppings moved away, on to the Pacific, the War Department offered families of dead soldiers a one-time-only opportunity to have the bodies that had been buried in Europe exhumed, transported and reinterred at Arlington National Cemetery. So, on December 2, 1948, 2nd Lt. George C. Oertel Jr. came home for good.

Two years later, Brig. Gen. Hopping had a heart attack at the Pentagon and died there on January 11, 1951. He was also buried at Arlington.

Lang, during his teens, in his twenties and again in his thirties, visited his father's grave at Arlington, along with the graves of the Hoppings. He remembers that the visits gave him goose bumps and filled him with sadness -- and also with deep appreciation for his father's sacrifice. On his last visit to the grave, he brought his son, David, who is now 35, and is athletic and slender, with sharp features and dark coloring. The Langs all think David bears a strong resemblance to his paternal grandfather.

Lang said my visit has inspired him to make another visit to Arlington. He's planning to go next month with his wife and two grandsons, David, 9, and Caleb, 8. Learning more about his father, Lang said, "has instilled a sense of pride in his accomplishments and his sense of loyalty to the country . . . As a kid you say, 'My real Dad was killed in the war.' It gives you a sense of pride, but not the kind of pride that I am feeling now."

SEVERAL WEEKS LATER, I stood in a chilly April rain on a hillside at Arlington National Cemetery, finding it really hard to fathom that the remains of a young, vibrant man were buried beneath the uneven ground, covered with grass and weeds and bare spots of earth. In one direction, Oertel's grave has a pleasant view with evergreen trees, but it also overlooks the daily traffic jams of Interstate 395, the mass of the Pentagon and a Citgo gas station.

Within this sprawling 624 acres dotted with more than 290,000 graves, George Oertel has a small, white marble government-issue headstone, 21 inches tall, 14 inches wide, 4 inches deep. It is a random resting place between the graves of an Air Force colonel who died in the Vietnam era and the wife of an Army colonel who died in 1953.

George Oertel was buried alone, with none of his family nearby. It seemed to me particularly lonely somehow.

I studied the worn gravestone -- "Born October 5, 1919. Died July 11, 1944" -- and tried to grasp the loss endured by the Oertels, and by Louise Hopping and her son. It was only then that it really hit home to me that George Oertel had been the very same age at his death as my own first-born son, Daniel, is now.

As I pondered this, the drumbeat of a funeral cortege filled the morning air. A 100-soldier procession of Marines, crisply dressed in white and black, marched along Patton Drive. Six white horses -- one without a rider -- were pulling a wooden caisson holding a Marine's coffin. His casket was wrapped in an American flag. Behind the caisson walked half a dozen family members, with three cars following. I walked down the muddy hillside to witness the funeral, wondering if it was for a victim of the ongoing fighting in Iraq.

At the grave site, family and friends gathered under a protective canopy as the Marine Band played "Taps" and an honor guard fired rifles in salute before the band played the haunting melody of the Navy Hymn. The funeral, it turned out, was for Kermit Charles Zieg, who, just like George Charles Oertel, served in World War II as a second lieutenant and also received a Purple Heart for a war wound. Zieg, like Oertel, had a son who was born in 1944 and who was named after him. But fate allowed Zieg to live to the age of 85, the very same age that Oertel would have been this year. Zieg was allowed a 60-year marriage, a 20-year career in the Marines and a long, active life. So he was laid to rest, with his son and daughter and three grandchildren and family friends looking on. Then the band marched off, and I walked back up the hill to bid a silent farewell to a soldier who died much too young.

Peter Perl is a Magazine staff writer. Staff researcher Bobbye Pratt contributed to this article. Perl will be fielding questions and comments about this article Tuesday at 1 p.m. on www.washingtonpost.com/liveonline.