## The Fifty Years of Silence: Personal Dimension
The oath of secrecy that members of the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops took bound them not just professionally but personally for most of their adult lives.
Consider what this meant in practice. A veteran returning home in 1945 or 1946 had to explain his wartime service in terms that concealed everything specific about what he had done. He could say he served in Europe. He could say he was in the Army. He could not explain what his unit was, what operations he participated in, or what any of it had accomplished. The medals and commendations that might have documented his service were themselves classified or incomplete. When other veterans told their stories at reunions and gatherings, he had to listen without being able to fully participate.
The question that haunts this dimension of the story is what was lost. Many of the artists who served in the 23rd went on to careers in which their wartime experience might have been relevant — to their own development as artists, to their professional reputations, to the ways their work was understood. Bill Blass became one of America’s most celebrated fashion designers. Ellsworth Kelly became one of the most important abstract painters of the twentieth century. Neither could publicly discuss the period of their lives that the Army had spent to its own purposes.
The secrecy also affected the historical record. The conventional military history of World War II in Europe was written largely in the decades immediately following the war, when veterans could still speak and documents were being first examined. The 23rd’s story was absent from that history, not because nothing had happened but because the institutional mechanism that would have allowed it to enter the record was locked. By the time declassification occurred in 1996, many of the men who would have been primary sources were gone. The interviews that Rick Beyer conducted with surviving veterans in the early 2000s captured men in their 70s and 80s recalling events from sixty years earlier — valuable testimony, but filtered through decades of enforced silence and the selective memory that all long retrospects involve.