Chuck Midlam now and then. Today living in Kings Point with his wife Sandy, the good-hearted and adventurous young man remains. Mitch Traphagen Photo
Chuck Midlam is a man who has lived life on his own terms. Except, possibly, for the day he was left dying on a battlefield with wounds to his head and leg from enemy fire. Half of his unit was gone and Chuck was left for dead. From there, his life took a new course, or, perhaps it was always his course. Now in his 10th decade, Chuck has always lived life on his own terms.
The German M88 tanks were firing from the mountains in France, momentarily decimating the American line. Along with much of his unit, Chuck was hit, presumably fatally. And then the shelling had stopped, and he knew it was bad as he bled in the relative silence of the battlefield, with only the echoes of the mortar barrage and the bodies remaining. And that’s when he met Ferdy, a 12-year-old boy with the French Underground.
“It would have been in 1944,” Chuck said. “There were tanks up on the mountains. They had the range. Our lines were disintegrating. I was taken to an Underground hospital; the Germans didn’t know that the French Underground was patching us up there. So the Germans came in and I went through my pockets and had to get rid of the codes. The Germans could have searched me. I called the nurses and asked them to burn them.”
Chuck was a radio operator. The radio codes he held could not fall into enemy hands, and had to be destroyed. It wasn’t the only time he had to get rid of them.
Perhaps it was fate, perhaps it was something larger, but Chuck had help in getting to that hospital.
“There was this kid, a French kid, who came out to the battlefield afterwards who found me,” he said. “Here I am, shot up, and he’s talking to me. ‘You came this far to save us…,’ he told me.”
And then that kid would save Chuck.
He was badly wounded and can’t remember the details. But he remembers the kid and his friends used a board, perhaps an old door, to carry Chuck to that hospital.
The kid was Ferdinand Gaydon, and Chuck owed him his life. While in the hospital, he told “Ferdy” that if he should ever need anything to just get in touch. Chuck wrote down his home address. He envisioned getting together after the war, two young men with their lives ahead of them, taking on the town and the world.
Chuck is a happy man. He is a generous man, sharing his life, his sheer joy with life, and even things material, with others. He has a sense of adventure, and open warmth remains with him to this day. It is impossible to know if Chuck’s heart and sense of adventure stem from his second chance after nearly dying on that battlefield or if it is just inherently his wonderful, warm and curious character, but Chuck Midlam is a man irrepressible. Life opens doorways and he walks through them with a smile on his face. Back in that hospital it was so, and a 70-year friendship developed with the young man who saved his life. But the war wasn’t quite over yet.
“It was in France where all hell broke loose,” Chuck said. “I still have a piece of shrapnel in my brain, they couldn’t get it out. They put me back together, and told me that my injuries were too much to just send me back, but they said, ‘If you want to go…,’ and I said, ‘Let’s go!’ So I volunteered twice.”
And later he again found himself behind enemy lines.
“I got trapped behind enemy lines twice. I was probably the only one in the war who enjoyed it,” he said with a laugh. “When I was a child, I had terrible nightmares. I can tell you, nothing the Germans had could compare with those nightmares. When guys were out digging foxholes, I was out shooting at airplanes. I would pull out my bullets and put tracers in. I tell you, I had to lead those planes a hell of a long ways. Finally, I was coming close to hitting one. A captain told me to knock it off because it was showing the enemy where we were.”
He was out on his own the second time he got caught behind the lines. He knew the dangers and he knew, once again, that getting rid of his radio codes was his first priority. He had been told that if there was nothing else, he should simply eat them.
“I couldn’t eat it,” he exclaimed with a laugh. “I just couldn’t. So I tore them up into little pieces and threw them into water.”
When the war was over, Chuck returned home to Ohio, went to college and built a business. He was then, as always, his own man and went about things his own way, finding success along that path.
Not long after returning home, Ferdy contacted him. He asked Chuck if it were possible to get a vacuum tube for a radio, something unobtainable postwar in decimated France. For a veteran-turned-college-student, it was no small feat, either.
“It cost me $40 to buy that thing,” he said, smiling. He cut down on meals for a while to afford it. “I ate a lot of crackers then. When you owe somebody your life, there is nothing you won’t do.”
Chuck later shared his collection of coins with Ferdy and has reunited with him and his wife Nanette, both in Florida and France. Although it has been 40 years since they’ve last seen each other, their friendship hasn’t waned. Sandy, Chuck’s wife of 30 years, a beautiful and youthful-looking woman, has taken over much of the letter writing.
And Chuck doesn’t want to talk much more about the war.
After World War II, there was no concern about Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. Soldiers were expected to come home and simply pick up their lives. But that wasn’t easy, not for Chuck nor for the millions of other American heroes who had saved the world. For years afterward, he always carried a gun in his pocket, loaded and ready to go.
“I finally got over that and I buried the bad things and have remembered the good things. It took a while,” he said.
Yet his sense of adventure remained. He fulfilled a lifelong dream in owning and flying three airplanes, including a crash with one and flights as far away as the Bahamas with another. (“I couldn’t afford a new airplane, so I bought other people’s junk,” he said, smiling.) And he trusted his sense of adventure when it came to his career.
“I wanted to go into chemical science,” he said about college. “I couldn’t get through it. A professor guided me along and said there was ‘one track we can put you on.’ All I wanted was a piece of paper that had my name on it. He said ‘we could make a scientist out of you’ and suggested entomology — I didn’t even know what that was but I said, ‘Let’s go!’ So I became an entomologist.”
And in business, his good heart remained.
“He never sold a product to a customer if he didn’t feel they really needed it,” Sandy said of him. “He has always been honest.”
In the end, Ferdy saved two lives. First Chuck’s and then, indirectly, Sandy’s life.
Chuck and Sandy Midlam in their Kings Point home, standing in front of gifts from Ferdy. “I am happy. I’ve lived a full life,” Chuck said. Mitch Traphagen Photo
“My late husband had cancer,” Sandy said. “We fought it for five years before it finally won. I was so worn down physically and emotionally, I was close to death. I came to Florida and I met Chuck. Chuck decided I wasn’t going to die. And then I didn’t.”
And for 70 years, the friendship born from a bloody battlefield and a life saved has remained. Although Sandy has yet to meet Ferdy, she has taken over the letter writing, using a computer to translate her English into French.
“We chat like we are friends,” she said. “We are friends.”
Chuck is a modest man. He never mentioned his Purple Heart, nor the other medals and commendations he received. He talked about Ferdy, Sandy and the good times they have had. Only occasionally in his eyes, eyes that reveal the soul of a generous and adventurous young man, could the buried sadness be seen. But only occasionally.
Not long ago, just before New Year’s Day, a small, heavy package arrived at their Kings Point home. The deliveryman said it required a signature. Inside was a gift from Ferdy, a beautifully intricate gold and hand-painted replica of a Fabergé Egg. It was a gift that represents love, and the renewal of life, as it was for the originally famous egg created by Peter Carl Fabergé and given by Russian Czar Alexander III to his wife for Easter.
There have been other gifts, including a set of beautifully crafted goblets, but the greatest gift has been seven decades of friendship that began with a life renewal on a bloody battlefield.
He was willing to give his life on the battlefield for Ferdy, despite not yet knowing him. As he lay bleeding from his wounds, he was likely even preparing for it. But Chuck’s spirit is infectious in the best of all possible ways. He has no doubt changed lives wherever he has gone. As much as Ferdy had saved Chuck’s life, Chuck has, perhaps, also saved Ferdy’s.
“You can be happy anywhere you want,” he said. “That is my way of living. I’ve had a full life. My life has so much in it.”
And then, with his arm wrapped around Sandy, they kissed and smiled at each other. Halfway through his tenth decade, Chuck is a happy man, a grateful man. Saved from death on a battlefield, he has lived life on his own terms and filled it with love, friendship, adventure and integrity.
