Dachau, Germany

The German morning was cold and wet. But for 50 National Guard soldiers, comfort was the last thing on our minds.

We were leaving for Kosovo the next day. Instead of packing or visiting castles, however, we came to the infamous Nazi concentration camp near Munich.

On this chilly October day, as we walked through the iron entrance gate bearing the inscription, "Arbeit Macht Frei," we hoped to understand the Holocaust and what happened here.

The camp today is plain and unassuming. A large courtyard where the prisoners gathered for daily roll call is now home to only monuments and memorials.

The initial hint that we are in a terrible place is the first statue we encountered. It's a collage of intertwined and emaciated human shapes seemingly entangled in barbed wire. It is simply inscribed "1933-1945."

Nearby is a small memorial of dark stone proclaiming "Never Again" in five languages.

Inside the old administration building, which is now a museum, we saw photos of prisoners and the old buildings, but nothing of the horrors that I anticipated.

Sgt. John Hairston of Tennessee said, "I expected to see artifacts and graphic images, but these exhibits seem sanitized."

That would soon change.

We crossed the center of the camp where 32 long rectangular foundations mark the sites of the prisoners' barracks.

Inside two reconstructed barracks we see unsoiled wooden bunks-some four high-depicting how prisoners slept. But they couldn't possibly represent the filth and disease as it truly was when hundreds were packed into a space large enough for just a few.

As we continued north through a row of tall trees in the center street, we encountered guard towers and barbed wire parallel to a ditch and a stretch of grass.

Beyond a small bridge and through a gate, we came upon a simple red brick building resembling an old train station. I entered and found myself facing a row of ovens.

It took me a moment to understand what I was seeing. The cooking units resembled big pizza ovens. But no food was ever prepared here.

Staff Sgt. Keith Thomas of Kansas summed up what we were all seeing in our mind's eye. He said the horror, "Sat on my chest like a stone."

I stared at the four brick ovens, each the size of a small car, and the "litters" used to slide corpses into the furnaces. I thought of the thousands of bodies that were destroyed here and the horrible events that led the victims to this room.

A sign on the wall revealed that some prisoners took their last breaths here. They, were brought in alive and hung from the rafters before being incinerated.

I stepped across the cement floor for a closer look and my foot landed on a drain cover. I wondered why there would be a drain in the floor, but I quickly figured it out. The drain carried away the body fluids of the prisoners and the sweat and vomit of the guards.

First Sgt. Robert Lollar of Tennessee said, "I can't believe that nobody in the town knew [the ovens] were here and that these things were being used."

Sgt. 1st Class Kirk Meyer of Kansas said, "It is a very eerie feeling to see how bad die human race can be."

After coming to grips with what we saw, we continued our horrible tour. We visited the gas chamber, which historians believe was never used, and walked past the commemorative statue to the "Unknown Prisoner" and mass graves where hundreds of prisoners were shot and buried.

We walked in silence back to the memorial with the simple inscription, "Never Again." I now understood exactly what it meant.

Sergeant Thomas said, "Looking at that sign makes you feel proud that American soldiers stopped those horrors over 60 years ago and we are now living by that vow when we deploy to areas like Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan. We are helping defend all civil rights, no matter the race or religion."

I thought about our mission in Kosovo and the ethnic cleansing that occurred in the Balkans in the 1990s.

We were walking back through the main gate when something else caught my eye. On the wall are two plaques honoring the soldiers of the 42nd Infantry Division and the 20th Armored Division of the U.S. 7th Army for liberating Dachau April 29, 1945.

I remembered reading about the 45th Infantry Division's role in the liberation. I recalled the sacrifice of its soldiers and the thousands of American lives lost during World War II to liberate hellish places like Dachau.

More than 32,000 prisoners died here. The bodies of many of them were burned in those huge ovens.

I thought about the simple vow on the memorial and decided to make it my own. Never Again.

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