By Richard Tedesco
The wind whipped through waste-deep snow in a forest that was always dark, daytime or night, with its heavy canopy of tall fir trees. It was so cold, he recalls, it was almost impossible to stop shivering enough to actually fall asleep, huddled in a foxhole with the terrifying sounds of German 88-millimeter artillery shells shattering trees and "screaming mimi" rocket launchers ringing in your ears nightly.
"If you heard the sound, you were okay. It was when you didn't hear the sound that you had a problem," he said, laughing.
There wasn't much to laugh about at the time. Parise was 20 years old, serving in the 312th combat engineers of the 87th Infantry Division attached to General George Patton's Third Army. The 87th accompanied Patton's tanks in helping to break through the German encirclement of the 101st Airborne Division and other American units in Bastogne.
"That was the worst time, in or out of the Army," he said.
The Battle of the Bulge, the biggest land battle of World War II, was largely a fight to survive for a young infantryman from Inwood. American infantrymen were woefully ill-equipped for the 40-year low temperatures of that winter in the Ardennes.
Parise vividly remembers the regimen all GIs maintained to keep feet dry: "We only were issued two pair of socks. And to keep them dry, we used to take them off and Everybody had two pair of socks and you'd wrap them around your neck to dry them out."
Sixty-two years on, the physical sensation of cold still hasn't left him. Like so many other GI's, Parise suffered frostbite - and never came off the front line for relief. "Right now my toes are cold," Mayor Parise said, sitting behind his desk in Cedarhurst Village Hall recently.
The numbing cold of the Black Forest battlefield was followed by the shock of the aftermath. "After the battle, the bodies you saw were unbelievable, thousands of bodies in the ice and snow," he said. He remembers seeing bodies chopped out of the ice and carried away on bedsprings taken from houses in a nearby town.
Many of those bodies were members of the 87th Infantry, which ran headlong into a German panzer attack on Dec. 30 while advancing with the U.S. 11th armored division.
There was a more shocking sight of human devastation awaiting Parise's unit in April at a place called Buchenwald: "I remember seeing the ovens and the human remains. There were these long trenches full of bodies."
An eerie silence hung over the death camp, which had recently been liberated by the Third Army. What remained was the evidence of unimaginable atrocities against humanity that every U.S. Army unit in Germany was ordered by Gen. Eisenhower to witness at one or another of the camps.
Death was frequently a more personal experience for Parise. He lost his closest friend, Squad Leader Sgt. Al Kimpinski, when they split their squad on a reconnaissance mission along a road to smoke out snipers. Kimpinski and his six men were pinned down by a German sniper, and when the squad leader made a move to break out of the position, "he took a bullet and he was killed instantly."
So Corporal Andrew Parise became a buck sergeant and replaced his friend as squad leader.
While clearing mines on the Siegfried Line, a defensive network of fortifications on Germany's western border, he saw his life-long friend Chet Cafasso blown sky-high from a nearby mine explosion - and survive with a broken hip.
He finally came off the line for a few days during his unit's final advance into Germany before contacting Russian troops. A German sniper's bullets struck him in the back of both legs while his unit was removing German roadblocks of felled trees intended to slow down the Third Army's tanks.
He spent three days in a field hospital, earning a Purple Heart and a quick trip back to the front. "The only reason you didn't come off the line was if you couldn't walk," he recalled.
He earned a certificate of merit during the Battle of the Bulge when he was on patrol near St. Hubert one night and spotted six soliders in GI khaki wearing red kerchiefs coming from the direction of the German lines. He immediately reported what he saw, and his suspicions were confirmed when the six German infiltrators were quickly taken prisoner.
They were heady days of danger for Parise. But he remembers some good times in the midst of the mayhem. After the 87th Infantry crossed the Rhine and helped win the battle of Koblenz, driving the German Army before them. "The first thing, we blew the doors off the vaults in the banks we had money like you couldn't believe. And the local taverns there were still selling beer and the money was almost worthless, so you'd give the waitress a whole pack of money just for a beer."
He remembers the comradeship and he remembers being reunited with his four brothers - three in the Army, one in the merchant marine - after the war.
He had earned a month-long furlough, arrived home in late July 1945, immediately marrying his high school sweetheart, Lillian. His unit's next destination was Japan, for the land invasion that was then being planned. Just several days into his honeymoon, he heard about the atomic bomb being dropped on Hiroshima.
It was the best news he can ever remember because he surmised, correctly, that the war would soon end without that dreaded land invasion.
Fresh out of high school when he was drafted with 120 other Five Towners in 1942, Parise never thought twice about risking his future: "Then it was a different time. You had everybody behind you. That was the thing to do, to go in."
Today, he's confused about the conflict in Iraq. "I don't understand this whole war. To me, they're not really fighting a war there. I don't know what the hell they're doing there."
He lost his wife Lillian to breast cancer in 1994, and has said his full-time job as mayor is like a companion that keeps his mind occupied.
But when he feels that icy sensation in his toes, he sometimes finds himself reflecting on a time spent half a world away, fighting an unseen enemy in the frozen forest of a battle that helped put the kibosh on German fascism.
