Arley to Italy

Rarely when you drive by the houses of Walker County do you think, “A hero lives there.” But that’s the way heroes are. They do not live lives of flash, pizzazz, or glamour, and World War II, Greatest Generation folks are especially modest. Enter Travis Phillips of Jasper.The rustic recesses of his Third Avenue home do not bespeak of aristocracy, but family, and faith. A green and white cross-stitched placard that reads JESUS sits on a bookcase filled with pictures of family in myriad frames. A Flanders-reminiscent oil painting print of a priest with bread, wine, and Bible hangs in the kitchen. Phillips’s wife Valaie (folks call her Val), six years his junior but still scooting about the domicile, attends to the house, and to him.The soft-spoken man grew up in Arley, picking cotton out of Winston County fields as an eight-year-old. The march to those fields from his home was ten miles there and back, until the family finally scraped up enough cash for a Chevrolet. Later on, the young boy plied a living hauling logs for a lumber company in Arley until age 21 when he, like many men, answered the call of the Draft and was thrust into the African and European theaters of war. “When I was drafted, they sent us to Fort McClellan in Anniston. They asked us what we were good at, and I told them I was a truck driver. That took me all the way through my army life,” he recalls.Brief layovers in Atlanta, Camp Crowder (Missouri), Louisiana (for Basic Training), and Virginia preceded fifteen days aboard a ship to Casablanca, Morocco. While in Virginia, the Army gave Phillips a shot in both arms and a white sheet. “That white sheet was my coffin and I didn’t know it. They said, ‘Hopefully, you’ll be able to bring this back with you.’”Crossing over the deserts of North Africa (and somehow evading German Field Marshall Erwin Rommel’s swath), Phillips’s company was transported via cargo ship to Sicily, and finally, Italy. While migrating north to port, the ship and the rest of its hive were attacked in a 2 a.m. barrage by a German submarine. “I have never heard such a blasting going on in my life. We sunk that German sub. Oil came up through the water and we knew we had sunk it,” says Phillips.For Phillips, Italy meant transporting cargo on a green truck called the “Hell’s Angel” through the snaking, crude dirt roads and war-strickened grape fields. In more than one instance, Phillips eluded death, as buildings he had just recently departed from or were heading to were shellacked by German shells. “The shells were just a-singin’ comin’ at you,” he says. Victims of mortality dotted the hills while parachuters dropped from the skies in the most vitriolic of all human endeavors.Describing the macabre scene in Florence, Phillips remembers: “There were people killed in the street. Blood was running down the street. Mussolini, they hung him.”In 1945, the end of combat and V-E Day nodded the return home for most of our soldiers. Phillips remembers that his return coincided with his birthday, May 30.“That was one of the best things that ever happened to me,” he said. “I was over in Pisa, Italy. I’ll never forget. I took a train and then saw that aircraft carrier, and when I walked up that gang plank, I was singing, ‘I’m going home. I’m going home.’ That was the prettiest thing I’ve ever seen in my life—that ‘ole aircraft carrier.”For those impeccable few men still living who survived the greatest of all campaigns, war marches on. It flashes in the night in bright truck decals and mortar flares, and beckons the nightmares of bygone, sanctioned savagery.So tonight as Phillips sleeps, war and its inescapable residue may facilitate his tossings. But one must think that his legacy as a soldier and family patriarch gives him some semblance of peace in those restless nights. A wife of over sixty years, two children, a bucket of grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren.Nearly seventy years have passed since he boarded that aircraft carrier, singing a song and carrying with him that symbolic white sheet. So many honorable soldiers were not as fortunate to build a life and a family outside of war. Their earthly legacies end in humble, white cross graves, where beneath, clothed in white, they forever remain. 78