Grandpa was a warrior
"Dressed to Kill," by Joseph C. Fornelli, from the National Vietnam Veterans Art Museum.
"Any warrior has something happen when he puts on his battle clothes - you feel that it gives you a kind of magical power, makes you invisible or gives you strength inside. So something takes over that as a rational person you know is ridiculous. But if you thought that way in combat you'd be dead. You're so vulnerable... you know, there is a certain strange high, and excitement about somebody shooting at you and you at them. It's hard to breathe and pushes on your shoulders. This heavy air, the heat, the humidity of Vietnam, is something you don't know. It's the kind of air you can feel touching your body and pushing at you."
***
In Liam's school all the kids were given yellow construction-paper stars and asked to write the name of a veteran they know for display on a certain board in the hallway. Yesterday there were 190 stars up. Some of them had full names, rank, and branch info. Some had the names of family members who'd served in other countries. But most of them just had "grandpa" written on them in crayon. It's unusual--these moments when the space and time between disparate identities evaporate, and we're supposed to consider a soldier and a grandpa in one view--knowing what we think we know about soldiers and grandpas. But all we can really see is a smiling old man with a parchment-skin hand resting on the skinny shoulder of his grandchild. So your eyes fill up; sometimes the blurriness helps.
What secrets we keep.
posted by I n g e r @ Friday, November 10, 2006
3 Comments:
i watched a documentary consisting primarily of interviews with the boys who'd fought in iwo jima -- and they were boys, the eldest among them, an ancient 26 during the campaign. two among them affected me more than all the others, more than anything else i'd seen on tv, i think. they were teenagers at the time. one caught a shell to the face, and was blinded. his friend said his face had looked like "a bowl of raw meat." not that the friend was in a much better position. he'd had his legs machinegunned, and couldn't walk. so there they are, the two of them, on a godforsaken island in the middle of the pacific, no cover anywhere, desperate nevertheless to find some. they had to become one creature to do it. "he was the legs. i was the eyes." i burst into tears. for the horror of it all, that they survived at all, that they recovered and went on to have wives and children that had never heard about that day before that minute.
before then, i used to think it was funny and a little strange that wizened old men would get together in their little caps and medals and muse about the old days in folding lawn chairs and get mum whenever a woman got nearby. now i don't. "it was loud like i couldn't tell you." i don't doubt that. i would have had to have been there, and i wasn't. the only thing i can do is incline my heart toward the quiet reverence anyone who's been to hell and back is due. much harder, of course, when the object of reverence has osteoarthritis and the piles, and yells at you for letting the screen door slam. all the moreso because you don't know, because there aren't words, that it was loud like he couldn't tell you.
You write good, sister.
37 online does, too, even if she doesn't have a shift key.
"dressed to die" is more like it if you ask me.
lmao @ grumpy, i don't have a shift key either. ha.
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