He lets the lighter, its purpose fulfilled, slip absently through his fingers. Then he pulls the soggy-filtered cigarette from his lips and sets it down on the table, his eyes never leaving her face.
“I’ll tell ya what,” he says softly: so softly that the words are almost ethereal. “There are things I could say, but instead….”
He takes her face in his hands.
“… I think I’ll just love you while you’re here…”
He pulls her, gently, closer.
“… and let the future take care of itself, okay?”
She smiles, eyes shining, and kisses him.
And with that kiss, no more words need to be spoken. And in that kiss, their lives the light and the hope and the knowledge and the promise of all possible worlds.
WAR STORIES
By James A. Moore
My grandfather was a good man. He raised his family well, and he raised my mother in a lifestyle that left her nurturing and caring. She did the same for me. But he and I had a special connection when he was alive, something my mother never knew about, and, if I have my way, never will.
He and I had both fought in wars on foreign soil. He fought in the Second World War and in Korea. I fought in Vietnam. We had both seen more than our share of combat, and we were both left scarred by what we’d been through. It’s hardly an exclusive club, even in this day and age, but it was definitely a connection.
Before I went to Vietnam, he and I were not really very close. He’d show up, I’d spend the day with him and the family, and he’d leave. When I was very young, he’d tell me a few anecdotes about his time in the service, but he would never tell me about any of the combat he’d been through; he would stop speaking of them if I came into the room.
He tried to shelter me from the horrors of war, and I guess a part of me just might have resented that. What kid growing up a baby boomer didn’t want to at least try to imagine what it must have been like to storm the beach at Normandy? Hell, half the movies made when I was growing up were about kicking Nazi butt. I almost felt that such stories were my due. So, yes, I suppose I did resent the loss of heroic tales that so many kids had. But I also understood that he didn’t like to speak of the wars, and I knew that my mother was glad not to have to listen to the tales. Both her husband and her youngest brother had died in Korea, fighting over ideals that meant a lot less when they cost a family member or two. As frustrated as I was by the lack of adventure tales from a man I knew had actually seen heavy combat, she was grateful, so I understood his reluctance. I just wasn't thrilled by it.
We never spoke about his time in the wars, my grandfather and I, until after I came back from Viet Nam. And when we did finally talk of the matter, it was in subdued tones.
I got home in ’69. They told me I could leave, that my term was done, and I went from the bloodstained rice paddies to the cool early October evenings at the family farm in Colorado. At least my body did. Harvest wasn't really a problem. We lived on a dairy farm. So instead of losing myself in the frantic work of gathering the autumn crops, I did what so many people did after they came back; I lost myself in resentment and cold, bitter rage. Every time I closed my eyes I found a different sight to haunt me: sometimes it was walking through the steaming jungles, sometimes it was running for dear life from artillery fire that would have completely destroyed my little home town of Summitville, and praying the trees between me and the shells would be enough to save my ass again. They were, though only just barely.
Plenty of my friends and fellow soldiers died badly in that war and some of them did it only a few feet away from me. All of those movies I’d been weaned on hadn’t even begun to prepare me for dealing with the madness. Surely they never said a thing about hostility on the home front when I came back. Just as often I saw the angry faces of strangers calling me hideous names when I stepped back on my home soil. The names they called me too often reflected my own opinion of myself at the time.
Now and then, mostly when I closed my eyes, I got a nice flashback to growing up in Summitville. I got glimpses of Antoinette Sanderson’s incredible green eyes when we shared out first kiss or even a sight of her perfect breast the one time I’d seen it. I got a look at the Halloween Festival in Town Square, and remembered the fun we all had building the scarecrows that stood like sentinels around the festivities. But those were rare, just enough to keep me sane. Mostly I saw the dead and the dying in rivers of blood. It was “kill or be killed” over there, as my sergeant was fond of saying, and I did far too much killing to never be happy about having survived.
But I did discover a way to numb the pain for a while, a way to crush the overwhelming guilt of surviving when so many people who were braver or just plain more innocent than me died in screaming increments. I discovered booze. Beer was my preference, and Budweiser the drink of choice. I didn’t sip and savor the beer I consumed. I drank it fast, hoping for numbness from the darkness I felt growing inside of me.
I never quite made it to alcoholic, but it wasn't for lack of trying.
Two weeks, and already all of my dreams had been shattered. Toni Sanderson was off in college, and even though I didn’t speak to her, it was made very clear to me that she was seeing someone else and it was serious. I’d almost managed to figure that part out anyway; the letters, which were so frequent when I first left for the war, were less common and often seemed almost too friendly. She sent the last few either out of a misplaced sense of guilt or out of a need to keep me from feeling lower than I already did. I couldn’t even see her to put what was left of our relationship to rest with a proper funeral. Not unless I felt like driving to Denver, and I was afraid to do that because one of the faces I’d seen calling names when I got off that damned plane and looked around had looked an awful lot like Toni’s. If I’d found out that she had been one of the protesters, it would have been too much for me. I was wise enough to know that much, at least.
No girl waiting for me when I got back, not like in the pictures in Time and Life magazines. No victory parades, not even a hero’s welcome. I just stepped back into my life as best I could. I wasn't very good at it, either; I started drinking and taking out my frustrations on the people closest to me. I roared at my mother when everything wasn't just so, and it was seldom just so, you may rest assured. I glowered at my grandfather, feeling that he should have prepared me better for the madness of war, I suppose, though the thought was never that well cemented in my head at the time. I ignored the rest of Summitville. They were not worth my time: they had not welcomed me back with open arms, but merely nodded and went on their way, embarrassed I suppose, to have a soldier come back intact.
So beer became my one true friend to my way of thinking and I left the rest of the world to fend for itself.
My grandfather put a stop to that nonsense before it could go too far. I was sitting out on the porch about two weeks after I got home when he decided it was time to set me straight. As I watched the sun do its slow descent toward Lake Overtree, he moved arthritically over to the chair next to mine and settled himself in. It took a while; though he walked very well on his fake leg, sitting and standing were still a challenge. I did my best to ignore him. He lit a Camel cigarette, blowing the smoke out past his dentures with a satisfied gust of wind, and then reached down next to me to take one of my beers. I wasn't feeling too greedy just then, so I let him.
He finished two more cigarettes and two more beers while the sun tried to hide behind the lake and mountains. It was properly twilight before he started speaking. “Reckon you’re feeling a mite sorry for yourself, Eddie.” I looked his way. He hadn’t called me Eddie since I was old enough to grow peach fuzz on my chin.
“Maybe I am, Grampa. Maybe I’m just trying to get my balance back.” Oh, it was just the right sort of pop psychology my grandfather could understand. I’d picked up the term from him, after all. He most often used it to refer to someone who was in mourning for a close family relative. “Emma needs to get her balance back is all
,” he’d say when someone made a comment about how poorly she was faring after her husband died in a bad car wreck. “She’s had a rough time, and it ain’t always an easy thing to start standing up again.”
He lit another Camel from the butt of the third, and cupped his hand around the cherry. He’d picked up that habit during WWII and had never stopped hiding that small source of light from potential snipers. “Yeah, I can see how you might need to. Everything I’ve heard says it’s a nasty conflict over there. They can call it a ‘police action’ all they want to, but you and I know better, don’t we?”
I nodded my agreement. Last I’d checked, police arrested people and locked them away for doing wrong; they didn’t crop bombs the size of VW Bugs on their houses and burn the forests away with napalm. I took one of his cigarettes as he grabbed another of my beers. I was trying to quit, but it wasn't easy. All of my willpower went to not blowing my top whenever my mother would look at me with a puzzled expression. She hadn’t been there. She couldn’t possibly understand what I’d been through. I had to remind myself of that fact every day. She got that puzzled look a lot. It was her way of asking what was wrong without actually saying the words.
“It’s been two weeks, Eddie, and you aren’t getting calmer. You’re just getting quieter. I figure you need to get it off your chest before it crushes you.”
I knew what he was talking about, but I just didn’t know how to say it. I didn’t know how to look at another person, let alone my grandfather, and explain how much I’d done, or how much I’d seen. I think he knew that, too.
He opened my beer with the church key he kept in his pocket and he took a long pull. “Maybe I should go first, just to break the ice?”
I blinked at that. He had never told me a war tale, and I fully expected he never would. I guess then was when I realized that I had become a part of a rather exclusive club, The Survivors’ Club. Off in the distance, I could hear my mother starting to prepare dinner. The radio was playing, and I suspect she couldn’t hear a word we said to each other. That was maybe for the best.
He told me about Normandy Beach and the sheer volume of death and artillery that day. He spoke in soft tones of his time in Korea, and the things he’d seen and done there. I shivered as I listened. The tales were very familiar to me, even if the location was different. I told him about the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and he listened in silence. We drank and smoked some more, toasting the names and memories of people we’d known who never made it back from their fights on foreign soil. By the time I’d finished, we were both buzzing and the sun had set.
My mother finished setting the table for dinner, but she never called. I suspect my grandfather had warned her about what he was going to do. I suspect that she understood well enough to know that supper could wait for a while.
We traded tales of combat and bloodshed, as I imagine many veterans have done over the years. Some were stories that were almost happy little slices of humor in the middle of Hell. Most were not.
My mind was tired and my tear ducts were sore; I had done a lot of crying, though the tears were silent ones. Finally, when I was almost ready to call it a night, my grandfather told me his last war story. Even now, so long after it happened and after it was told, it still gives me shivers.
We had moved on to the worst of the things we had seen and the worst we had done, pulling up the dregs of our experiences and showing them to each other with a morbid sort of fascination. I let him know what I and the rest of my squad had done in a little village where we suspected the locals were on the side of the enemy. He didn’t look at me differently when I was done and I’ve never been able to put into words how grateful I was for that.
He reached for his cigarettes again, and discovered the pack was empty. He reached for another beer and learned that they too were all gone. He shrugged and settled himself more comfortably in the wicker chair. “I reckon I should tell you about the chateau,” he said. And in his voice I heard a dread that made even Normandy seem like a pleasant story.
I looked over at him and saw him close those bright old eyes of his. His face looked as strained as it had when my grandmother died and when he heard about my father. I swallowed the fear I felt when I saw that look, and I nodded in the dark. “I guess maybe you should,” I said, in a voice I barely recognized as my own.
“I wasn't any older than you are now… might have been a year or two younger. I know I’d just barely gotten through basic training when I got over to France. It wasn’t like I’d expected at all. There were places where the war had made its mark, to be certain, but there were places where you’d have never known anyone was capable of even picking a fight. I’d seen a bit of both.”
He looked at me and his mouth smiled tightly, though his eyes stayed just as dark and stormy. “Met me a few fine women when I was over there, too. Some of them were very grateful to see a bunch of Yankees with supplies. But that ain’t what this here story’s about, is it?
“We weren’t all that far from Paris. We’d been in a few skirmishes and were lucky enough to come out of them with our hides intact. Mostly we managed to survive, but we weren’t winning often. There were only a handful of us to begin with. Jenkins was the Sergeant, and he was the highest-ranking soldier we had left at the time. Lieutenant Price had gotten himself killed only two days before, and we were supposed to be heading back to the field command. Only problem was, we couldn’t figure out where we were trying to go. When Price died, he wasn't alone. Billy Sinclair was on radio duty at the time, and he and the radio both got themselves blown to pieces. We weren’t exactly enthusiastic about the way our week had been going, if you can catch my meaning.”
He stopped for a minute and without a word went back into the house. He came back out with more smokes but left the beer behind. “There were only five of us left: Jenkins, myself, Toby Baker. You’d have liked Toby, Eddie, he was a little butterball from Ohio, but he had a great laugh and he shared it a lot. After him, there was Emit Springer from New York and there was one last fella, a man named John Crowley. Where he was from, I couldn’t begin to tell you and I hope to never find out. In the middle of this entire snafu, Crowley was the only one of us who wasn't sweating bullets. He was as calm as a man could be, and normally about three times happier than he had any reason to be. He wasn't even part of our squad. He was just a straggler we’d sort of adopted along the way.
“Came out of the west right after everything went sour, and started walking in the same direction as us. Crowley was just as happy as a clam to run across us, and it wasn't long before we invited him to join in on march. We were on the same side, and he had better food than the rest of us combined. He’d run across a nice supply of sausages and bread the day before.”
Grandpa looked me straight in the face then, his eyes lit only by the glow of the ember he cupped in his hand. “Eddie, no man before or since has ever scared the hell out of me the way he did. There was something about him that just wasn't right. He didn’t scare me all the time, only when he looked directly at me, or talked to me…or smiled that nasty, evil grin of his. And Eddie, he smiled a lot. The worse things looked, the more he seemed to enjoy himself.
“He wasn't right, is what I’m saying. There was something about Crowley that made me want to hide under the sheets or call for my mother.” He cleared his throat, maybe afraid I didn’t know what he meant, but I did. “Anyhow,” he continued gruffly. “There were five of us left and most of what we had on us had been useless. Maybe we had a hundred rounds left all told, and we were lost as we could be. Knowing that Paris was close by and getting there isn’t the same thing. We had one advantage going for us: we were the good guys in the eyes of most the locals. There were a few who maybe didn’t mind the Nazis so much, or maybe had a deal going to report anything unusual, like a small group of American soldiers, but we hadn’t run across any.
“It was only a matter of time before we could work everything out and be on our way safely. At least, that’s what we kept telling ou
rselves and that’s what Jenkins kept telling us too. Lord, but we wanted to believe him.
“Not long after the sun had set, we got to moving ourselves from the field where we’d spent the day. We had to move at night, because the Nazis sure as hell weren’t going to ask us how we were before they started shooting. You know what I mean, I suspect.” I nodded my agreement. There were times when maybe the Viet Cong were too tired to look for us and times when we were too tired to look for them, and then there were times when we hunted each other like hounds with a fresh blood tail to follow. Maybe it was the phase of the moon, maybe it was just a vibe you picked up after a while, but sometimes you could tell when something was going to go poorly. You could tell when the enemy was in a killing mood.
“We’d only gone a couple of miles, tops, when we heard the convoy coming. Crowley heard them first, and in the darkness, with the moon above, I could see his smile when he noticed the sounds of vehicles rumbling past. His teeth flashed like lightning and his voice was amused when he spoke. ‘I’m guessing that those aren’t the good guys, fellas. I think we might want to make ourselves scarce.’
“He was right. The trail of German trucks that came past our little hiding place by the side of the road was huge. If it was less than thirty vehicles all told, you could have fooled me. Most of us kept our heads down, but Crowley laid in that trench next to the road and watched like a kid at a parade as every one of those loaded machines swept past us. How he managed to not get spotted is something I’ve never figured out.
“When the last one was gone and the dust from their passage had settled, Crowley slid down with his back to the road and smiled from ear to ear. ‘That’s a lot of security going up the road. I wonder what they’re hiding.’ I reckoned we could do without finding out until we got reinforcements, and I know everyone else agreed with me, but Crowley lost his smile when I made that comment. I think I liked him better with the smile right then. ‘We’re lost, Finch. Don’t you figure maybe we should find out what those Jerrys are up to before it can come back to haunt us?’
Mister October - Volume Two Page 30
