Now and then, mostly when I closed my eyes, I got a nice flash back of 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 ever 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.
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. 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’d first left for the war, were less common and often seemed almost too friendly. I could read between the lines as well as anyone else. 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 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, 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 and I left the rest of the world to fend for itself.
My grandfather would have none of it. 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, blowing the smoke out with a satisfied gust of wind past his dentures, 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 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.” 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 drop 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 everyday. 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. I shivered as I listened. The tale was 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 that 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 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.