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This post has nothing to do with Canada.
Nov. 11th, 2003 09:03 amToday's the day I always thought of as being my granddad's day; my mother's father served in England, France, and Italy, and possibly part of Poland or Germany (it's been a while since I saw his discharge papers last), during WW II. He was in the Army Air Corps, though he never flew a plane. He was a translator and a poison-gas handler, and he was at one point Hap Arnold's personal driver, and there was a day when he got busted down two ranks for getting drunk with his buddies and driving a tank through the wall of a barn in France.
He told me once about the difference between V1 and V2 rockets: one made a horrible roaring, whining noise as it came in, all the way up to the time that it exploded. And the other made the horrible noise- and then stopped, going dead silent for ten or fifteen seconds, and then exploded. The Germans fired them at the English airbase where he was stationed, but they never managed to actually hit the target, a fact for which I am grateful since Grandpa was part of that target.
He never would talk about the actual battlefield, except that once he told me, "We didn't win the war. We didn't lose- but once either side loses even a single man, they can't say they've won." My mother told me that when his unit came home from Europe he tipped all his medals over the side of the boat as they passed the Statue of Liberty on the way into New York Harbour. He didn't think he should have them when so many of his buddies and other good men had died.
He was a bricklayer in his civilian life. After the war he had a claustrophobic panic attack as he was working on his brother's brick-lined pizza oven. I dimly recall a Polish-sounding name on those discharge papers. I have my suspicions, but I can't prove anything.
He spoke English, Italian, and a little French. When the Americans liberated an area, he was the first one in; he'd tell the locals what had happened, and they'd give him the wine and the sausage and the other things that used to be gifts to soldiers in the days when this country did not have a reputation of being full of arseholes. Given what the Allies were liberating the locals from, I do not think there were very many towns that were anything other than grateful. In Italy, maybe, but in Italy he was a man named Leonardo Rafael, with a last name ending in a vowel, speaking a dialect of Italian used in the mountain region of Abruzzi. He looked the part and ate the food and spoke the language, and so regardless of uniform he was Family, Dammit.
He has Alzheimer's now. It's pretty bad. If I were to call him today and congratulate him on making it to another Veterans' Day I'm not sure he'd even know what I'm talking about; he's at the point where he has to have his own daughter introduced to him several times before he associates her name with her face, and where his conversations in his sleep are five times more coherent than anything he says when he's awake. Dylan Thomas can shove it up his ass; my grandfather has earned the right to go gentle into that good night a hundred times over.
May it go well with him, and with all the other veterans of that war and every other.
I should also like to congratulate my other grandfather, who is a veteran of the same war - but it should be mentioned that as he was rather younger, he did not get to join the Navy until '44 or '45, and before his ship could be sent out the war had officially ended. Sorry, Grandpa. You gave it a go, though.
Congratulations also to my Uncle Dominic, who served his country in Vietnam, and thank you to the Air Force for keeping him an airplane mechanic, because it meant that he did not see or do the things that scarred so many others so very badly. And to the other military members of my family - reservists and ROTC for the most part, thank Heaven, but still there at some point, still in the uniforms I never could wear. You did what was needed, in whatever ways you could, and some of you (most notably my Coast Guard cousin) still are. You done good, soldiers, and sailors.
(At the very last I should like to make mention of my great-grandfather on my father's side, who fought in the Great War. I am not sure exactly how to speak of him, as the rather garbled accounts I have of Great-Grandpa Carter seem to say he was in the Merchant Marine and that he, er, jumped ship and came into America illegally through Mexico, but he rates at least a mention anyway. Wouldn't be here without him, regardless of how he served or ceased to serve.)
He told me once about the difference between V1 and V2 rockets: one made a horrible roaring, whining noise as it came in, all the way up to the time that it exploded. And the other made the horrible noise- and then stopped, going dead silent for ten or fifteen seconds, and then exploded. The Germans fired them at the English airbase where he was stationed, but they never managed to actually hit the target, a fact for which I am grateful since Grandpa was part of that target.
He never would talk about the actual battlefield, except that once he told me, "We didn't win the war. We didn't lose- but once either side loses even a single man, they can't say they've won." My mother told me that when his unit came home from Europe he tipped all his medals over the side of the boat as they passed the Statue of Liberty on the way into New York Harbour. He didn't think he should have them when so many of his buddies and other good men had died.
He was a bricklayer in his civilian life. After the war he had a claustrophobic panic attack as he was working on his brother's brick-lined pizza oven. I dimly recall a Polish-sounding name on those discharge papers. I have my suspicions, but I can't prove anything.
He spoke English, Italian, and a little French. When the Americans liberated an area, he was the first one in; he'd tell the locals what had happened, and they'd give him the wine and the sausage and the other things that used to be gifts to soldiers in the days when this country did not have a reputation of being full of arseholes. Given what the Allies were liberating the locals from, I do not think there were very many towns that were anything other than grateful. In Italy, maybe, but in Italy he was a man named Leonardo Rafael, with a last name ending in a vowel, speaking a dialect of Italian used in the mountain region of Abruzzi. He looked the part and ate the food and spoke the language, and so regardless of uniform he was Family, Dammit.
He has Alzheimer's now. It's pretty bad. If I were to call him today and congratulate him on making it to another Veterans' Day I'm not sure he'd even know what I'm talking about; he's at the point where he has to have his own daughter introduced to him several times before he associates her name with her face, and where his conversations in his sleep are five times more coherent than anything he says when he's awake. Dylan Thomas can shove it up his ass; my grandfather has earned the right to go gentle into that good night a hundred times over.
May it go well with him, and with all the other veterans of that war and every other.
I should also like to congratulate my other grandfather, who is a veteran of the same war - but it should be mentioned that as he was rather younger, he did not get to join the Navy until '44 or '45, and before his ship could be sent out the war had officially ended. Sorry, Grandpa. You gave it a go, though.
Congratulations also to my Uncle Dominic, who served his country in Vietnam, and thank you to the Air Force for keeping him an airplane mechanic, because it meant that he did not see or do the things that scarred so many others so very badly. And to the other military members of my family - reservists and ROTC for the most part, thank Heaven, but still there at some point, still in the uniforms I never could wear. You did what was needed, in whatever ways you could, and some of you (most notably my Coast Guard cousin) still are. You done good, soldiers, and sailors.
(At the very last I should like to make mention of my great-grandfather on my father's side, who fought in the Great War. I am not sure exactly how to speak of him, as the rather garbled accounts I have of Great-Grandpa Carter seem to say he was in the Merchant Marine and that he, er, jumped ship and came into America illegally through Mexico, but he rates at least a mention anyway. Wouldn't be here without him, regardless of how he served or ceased to serve.)
