Rabo Karabekian’s wounding and capture in Luxembourg near the end of World War II cost him his left eye and brought his military service as a camouflage specialist to an abrupt end. The episode was both a physical loss and a dividing line: he had chosen to remain with a close-knit Army unit rather than pursue promotion, but after the war he returned to a life in which he felt he had nothing to come home to. His later account complicates the expected image of a wounded veteran by stressing that the injury caused him little remembered pain, while its consequences endured in his body and in his family life.

Service and Capture

Karabekian was a lieutenant commanding an Army Engineers platoon near the end of the war. The unit was made up of men who were artists or had artistic lives as civilians, assigned to camouflage because the Army believed artists would be especially good at deceiving the enemy. Their role had changed by the time of the Luxembourg episode: specialists in camouflage, they were fighting as ordinary infantry for their lives.

The unit’s camouflage work had previously made it valuable to successive commanders. It was not attached to a division or corps; instead, orders came directly from the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force, which temporarily assigned the men to generals who had heard of their deceptive work. Karabekian describes those commanders as patrons, fascinated by the unit’s illusions and grateful for its service. The men were also allowed a notably informal way of life, careless about dress and military courtesy. Against that unusual freedom and artistic fellowship, the sudden need to fight as infantry marks the danger of the episode.

Karabekian recalls no moment of being struck. His memory begins with the approach of a white German tank and soldiers dressed in white crossing a snow-covered meadow in Luxembourg. He was unconscious when captured. Morphine kept him unconscious until he awoke in a German military hospital established in a church across the border, in Germany. The sequence he remembers is therefore not a continuous account of the fighting but a sharp transition from the approaching enemy to captivity and hospital care.

Injury, Treatment, and Return

The wound healed quickly, and Karabekian was soon sent to a prisoner-of-war camp as an unremarkable captive. In later conversation, Circe Berman points out that he had previously described almost no pain and a rapid recovery. He acknowledges that account: he remembers no greater suffering from the injury than a civilian might experience in a dentist’s chair. This understated recollection does not undo the loss of his eye; it distinguishes the bodily pain he recalls from the injury’s lasting significance.

At the end of the war, the United States paid for cosmetic surgery to the area where his eye had been. The operation took place at Fort Benjamin Harrison, outside Indianapolis. Karabekian describes his response not as bitterness but as blankness, a state he recognizes in Fred Jones as well. In his telling, neither man had anything to return to. The state’s payment and the medical procedure mark a practical form of postwar provision, but they did not restore the life or attachments that military service had interrupted.

Military Family and Civilian Isolation

Before his capture, Karabekian had refused promotion beyond captain so that he could stay with his thirty-six men. He calls this his first experience of a family that large. The decision gives the platoon more than an operational role in his history: it represents a chosen community, held together by shared work and a distinctive, permissive military life. His later description of himself as a wounded veteran who had been a hermit for eight years makes the contrast between that community and his subsequent solitude especially pronounced.

The end of the war did not lead to a secure reunion with family. Karabekian says that he had no one he knew to come home to except a Chinese laundryman. He later married the nurse who cared for him in hospital, and they had two sons, Henri and Terry. The marriage failed: his first wife and sons left him in 1956, and the sons legally changed their surname to that of their stepfather, Roy Steel. Looking back, Karabekian identifies his failure as Dorothy’s husband and the resulting alienation from his sons as among the matters for which he is most ashamed. These later losses are not presented as direct consequences of the Luxembourg wound, but they give substance to his account of a veteran whose return did not restore a family home.

Memory and Significance

Karabekian’s account sets the injury within a wider question about what qualifies as an ordeal. He insists that he has a claim to survivor’s syndrome, even though he says the wound itself involved little pain and healed quickly. When asked whether he sometimes believes himself to be a good person in a world where almost all the other good people are dead, he answers no. The exchange makes survival a moral and relational question in addition to a matter of physical injury: surviving does not, for him, guarantee a sense of innocence, belonging, or recovery.

The narrative also leaves the exact circumstances of the wound partly unrecoverable. Karabekian says that if he killed anyone during the war, it would have been in the few seconds before a shell knocked him unconscious and took his eye. He does not claim certainty about what happened in that interval. The account thus places the loss at the edge of memory, between possible combat and confirmed capture, rather than filling the gap with a definitive scene.

The Luxembourg episode helps explain why Karabekian’s later identity as a painter and his military past cannot be separated cleanly. His platoon brought together artists, and his service put their skill in camouflage to military use; the same men were also forced into ordinary infantry combat. After the war, he remembered the platoon as a family and his return as empty. His lost eye is a visible consequence of that history, but the account’s emphasis falls just as strongly on the communities that did not survive the transition home: first the military group he chose not to leave, and later the family from which he became estranged.