U.S. ARMY Avery Chipman   If you’ve never traveled in space, says Avery Chipman, not even a veteran astronaut can make you truly understand what it’s like. That’s how the former 100th Infantry Division rifleman, now 83, feels about combat. “Unless you’ve been there, you can’t understand what it’s like to have that artillery and mortar fire pounding down around you, or to have the guy in the next foxhole peek out and, just like that, take a bullet right here,” he says, pointing to his forehead.  “I knew the chances of getting killed were pretty good and, after being in it a couple of weeks, you hope your time comes soon so you don’t have to go through too much. You get scared in terms of not knowing what to expect the next second, but not afraid to keep moving forward. I was a scout and they put a lot of confidence in me.” During his six months of combat in France and Germany, there were close calls. Shrapnel once tore through the leather strap of his helmet, instead of his skull. The heavy wooden stock of his M-1 rifle absorbed another remnant of artillery fire, sparing his leg. “I was always sticking my neck out,“ Chipman says. “I lucked out in more ways than one. I never had a scratch.” Chipman’s “Greetings” letter from the local draft board arrived on Nov. 17, 1942 — the day after he married Estelle Church. He was pulling lobster traps then and basic training at Fort Jackson in South Carolina proved he was in great physical condition. Being a lobsterman, he was also immune to seasickness. “As far as my endurance, I was in much better shape than those city boys,” he said. “And, when we went to Marseilles on a big troop convoy, we sailed into what the captain said was the worst hurricane he’d ever been out in. It lasted two days and two nights, but I never did get seasick. I was taking care of others, the guys puking in my helmet. One good thing, though: there weren’t so many people in the chow line.” To a boy growing up in Milbridge and Bunkers Harbor, November always meant hunting season. In November of 1944, Chipman, then 23, found himself hunting again, this time for Nazis in the Voges Mountains of France. “It was just like going deer hunting, only the deer in Maine don’t shoot back at you,” he says. “What I remember most about those mountains was rain, rain, rain. You couldn’t even find a dry cigarette. It was wet, wet, wet. And from the time we got off our troop ship in October until the war ended the first part of May, I had one shower and one change of clothes. You slept when you could in whatever low spot or foxhole you could dig, and you never took your boots off.” After 17 days of mountain warfare, Chipman’s Company G of the 2nd Battalion of the 397th Regiment of what was dubbed “The Century” Division had pushed the Germans back 35 miles and had taken 1,037 prisoners. After the decisive Battle of the Bulge, his unit was deployed to Germany. By the time Germany surrendered on May 8, 1945, Chipman’s unit had fought its way to Stuttgart, taking on what remained of Germany’s elite SS combat units. “The French people didn’t like us,” he said. “But the civilians in Germany tried to help us. They would tell us things they thought would be helpful.” After Germany’s surrender, Chipman and The Century’s other combat survivors were told they were headed to the Pacific to fight the Japanese. Like many of his comrades, and with his wife and young son, Jim, waiting back in Maine, Chipman was not amused. As things turned out, it never happened. The atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the subsequent Japanese surrender Aug. 14, 1945, were Chipman’s ticket home. “War is war, but it was better on the European front than the Pacific, in terms of the fighting and the living conditions,” he said. “We lost so many men in the Pacific. I don’t know why we had to take all those little islands. The worst part in Europe was the beach head invasions.” Departing by troop ship from Marseilles on Dec. 11, 1945, Chipman stepped off the train in Ellsworth on Dec. 28. Within a month he was back to lobstering and working on the Birch Harbor house in which he and Estelle still live. “Bar Harbor put on the biggest Fourth of July fireworks show back then,” he said. “We went that next summer, and the sound of those fireworks almost drove me up the wall. It made we want to dig a hole and crawl in.” Unlike many veterans whose wartime experiences are lost to the fog of time, Chipman’s service during World War II has been chronicled by a grandson, Joshua Bridges. Written in 2000 as a high school research project, Bridges’ carefully researched, 14-page account of his grandfather’s experiences is illustrated with maps of various battles and one of the few V-Mail letters Chipman was able to send home. “As my grandfather told me,” Bridges wrote, “‘No one understands what war is like unless they’ve been there.’”  — Tom Walsh