SERVICES: Samples
The following are excerpts from some of the stories I've had the privilege to document.
Most adoptees say they start their search for their birth family with the purpose of looking for their birth family for medical reasons. That's a good excuse, but it's not really what I find to be the real reason people start their journey. When you start to talk to adoptees about it, the truth is they want to know about themselves.
"My family was really excited about my book, 'It was an Interesting Life' and I've enjoyed sharing it with them." — Art Sorenson |
"ART SORENSON SHARES HIS EXPERIENCES OF WORLD WAR II"
I myself landed on Omaha Beach. In the beginning we didn’t do anything outstanding but then the supply lines got too long and the Army needed to open up the port of Antwerp so that their supply lines were shorter, because right now the supplies were coming all from the French beaches in Normandy, clear across. Eisenhower had a lot of problems with Montgomery because he just couldn’t seem to get his bat off his shoulder. Eisenhower sent our division to open up the port of Antwerp, which we did. When we got through with it, they pulled us down to Aachen and then we were first going into Germany. That’s where the Siegfried Line was. The interesting point there was that we went up and replaced the unit that was there and our company commander went back to have a conference on what we were going to do. When he came back he said, “Well, the Army line has become static because our supply lines are too long and they’ve decided that the 1st Army is the one that’s going to go off first. Second Corp is going to be the first of the 1st Army that’s going to go off and the 104th is going to lead off the attack, and guess which company is going up the hill first.” (laugh) - K Company and L Company, which was our company so we were the first ones at the Battle of Hill 287. Our mission was to secure this. Hill 287 was a key to the Siegfried Line. They said,” Don’t worry because the Air Force is going have a heavy concentration of bombing and neutralize that hill before we got up.” They were going to fly over about 11:00 a.m. and what they did was they flew over but they didn’t drop any bombs. They just dropped tinfoil. That was done to knock out their air defense equivalent of radar. Behind this hill was the heavy industrial area of Eschweiler. They wanted to knock out the air defense (laugh) which meant we really didn’t have any help at all. They thought we’d accomplish our mission in a couple of hours. Well, in a couple of days we hadn’t gone more than a hundred yards. We had pretty good losses. But we eventually conquered Hill 287. From there we went down into the Eschweiler area. Just past Eschweiler was another industrial area called Weisweiler. We were going to make a night attack from our position here (pointing to a point on desk) across this beet field. They raised sugar beets there. This beet field was about a half a mile across, till we got to the City of Weisweiler. We began our attack just when it was starting to get dark. We no sooner got started and the Company Commander says to affix bayonets (laugh). I thought, “Oh hell, (laugh) this is going to be worse than I thought it would be.” Anyway, we got across and got our mission accomplished without too much difficulty. |