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An interesting thing about history. Anything in history that happens before we are aware enough to experience it is all lumped together.
I was born five years after the end of the World War II. To me growing up that war was lumped in with the war for independence and the civil war. It was all ancient history.
I was very young when the Korean War was fought and don’t remember anything about it. I do remember Ike as president and him saying something about golf being the best way to ruin a good walk.
I’ve noticed the same thing with my children and grand children. They don’t know anything about the Vietnam war or the first Gulf war, nothing, nothing at all.
What they do remember is the living memorial. He is my dad, their grandfather and great grandfather. That’s him standing at the base of Paul Bunyan holding me when I was 2 years old.
Seven years after the end of World War II.
I remember always being told when I small to never touch daddy when he is sleeping. I would ask why and mom would say because he was in the war. To a 5 year old that didn’t make any sense till one night.
Mom asked me to go wake dad up. I called his name I kept saying Dad wake up. Nothing, so I touched his chest to shake it a little while saying “Dad wake up.” Before I got wak . . . out I was flying backward across the room and hit the wall. With the breath knocked out of me I whispered “Dad, time for supper.”
One day I found a small can with some things in it, a mangled zipper or something that looked like it, a few bullets, just the bullets not the shells with them, very long and strange looking and some coins from China.
Mom told me that in the war Dad had been hit by a sniper’s bullet. It hit him right on the zipper of his coat, right over his heart while he was walking. She said Dad and all the guys would carry cans of food in their jackets and when that bullet hit dad it tore the zipper right off his coat, but it hit a can of powdered eggs and turned and went out the side of his jacket while his arm was swinging and he didn’t get hurt badly from it.
Over the years there were more short stories of what happened in Burma with Merle’s Marauders, the 700 mile walk up the Burma Road and the eventual arrival in China.
The older I got the more I understood why he never talked about “The War”.
Unlike so many with which he served Dad came home. He came home to Mom and I and my two sisters have life today.
Mom passed away suddenly on March 5th this year. She lived only a few weeks after learning she had leukemia. They were married 64 years.
I try and visit Dad once a week, but I don’t always make it. He continues to live each day as it comes. He is my living memorial and as long as he lives everyday is memorial day for me.
