In My Memories

Sometimes it’s hard to sit here alone with nothing but memories. You hope your mind will start to wander from thoughts of home and the loved ones you can only pray are missing you as much as you are missing them. Someone once said, War is Hell, and there is no statement that rings truer. The war is why I’m here lonely so very far from my home.
It’s at times like this that I think back to memories that have long been lost in the recess of my mind, in a part that I don’t go to very much anymore. The important things seem to always be the first that suffer as childhood disappears. I can remember the first time I ever shot a gun with my grandfather…isn’t that a strange memory to have creep to the surface at a time like this? I was only three and I could barely hold it up. But grandpa and I shot at tin cans and a few times he even let me take a shot at a squirrel or chipmunk but I was always much too slow on the draw to hit one. I know now all that was being done is a lesson on respecting firearms was being ground into my impressionable mind, but at the time it was the grandest adventure I’d ever had up to that point. My father had served in the Army in the Great War and he told me he had no reason to ever touch a gun again but he wouldn’t stop me if I wanted to waste time firing off a few rounds with the old man. He never called Grandpa father, or daddy; it was always “the old man.” I figured it was something to earned the right to do when you were as old as the two of them were. When I turned five I spent the first of what would be thirteen summers on my grandparents farm twenty miles west of Knoxville. I was given a list of chores to complete first thing in the morning, before breakfast even, but after that the days were mine to explore and play. My good friends Kenny and Ralph and I invented an entire world of war torn lands where we were the knights in shining armor riding in to save the day of all the damsels. The damsel’s in distress usually turned out to be Ralph’s dog Max but we saved him every time all the same. Depending on our moods we’d either play our war games or we’d fish, built forts in trees we had no business trying to climb, or like most boys our age would do, spend time finding new ways to hurt ourselves. It was my third summer on the farm, I had just turned seven the week before and I was now invincible in my mind. Ralph had broken his arm the day I got there when he fell off his daddy’s tractor because he was acting like a fool; those were his daddy’s words not Ralph’s, so it was just Kenny and me that day. We were up in our favorite decrepit apple tree trying to get the first green apples of the season to shoot at the cows from our slingshots when it happened. Kenny was trying to help me up to the branch he was on…I was always the shortest of the gang…when a crack that shot straight through to my soul sounded as my branch gave way just as I was putting all my weight down on it to give myself a final lunge up to the perch I was trying to reach. The branch snapped and for one fleeting second Kenny had a hold of me until deductive reasoning told him that if he didn’t let me go we’d both fall to our certain deaths, so he let me go. I felt like I was running a mile a minute as my short legs kicked in the air for what seemed like a minute and a half, when I crashed through the lower branches of the tree and executed a perfect landing on my feet and promptly collapsed from the agony of two broken ankles. Despite the pain, I instructed Kenny on how to make a real Indian travois to drag me back to friendly lines. We had a grand game until we reached the farm and Granny whipped us both for being such little hell raisers and always causing her hair to turn gray. I thankfully held my tongue when she let that line go. Probably the only reason I lived to see eight. It was the last of my adventures for the summer as I was hobbled and it was August before the casts came off and I was able to limp around the farmyard. I was given all manners of extra chores to keep my busy until dark. Grandpa would sometimes sneak out as I raked chicken droppings into a pile and he’d laugh like a kid when I told him the story of my fall, even if it was the fifteenth time he’d heard it. Grandpa died in 1942, right after I came overseas. I regret to this day not getting able to tell him goodbye.
It’s hard for me to be alone, especially at night. I can’t seem to get any sleep these days so all I do day and night is think. I miss my family and friends, but right now I miss my comrades. It is hard to explain what happens to a group of strangers as they face all the new challenges that the Army brings towards them. Rather than wait to be drafted, I joined the Army in 1941, right after the Pearl Harbor attack. I had wanted to go into the paratroops but I couldn’t get up into an airplane without puking all over myself so any kind of airborne unit was out of the picture for me. I was in good enough shape to join up in another of the Army’s new elite units, the Rangers. I thanked all the mornings of chores on the farm for that, especially when I was a teen and spent every day baling and throwing hay. The Rangers were commando’s, being given the hardest missions the Army had. It was just the kind of thing I was looking for. I knew that if I was going to be in the Army it couldn’t just be a regular old infantryman. After basic training that every soldier goes through, I was assigned to a Camp in Alabama for Ranger training and let me tell you it was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. They worked us something fierce until it felt like our bodies would just fall apart from over use. But of course that didn’t happen. What did happen, much to our surprise is that the days got longer and harder but our bodies responded in kind. We were tough sons of bitches, our instructors would tell us. The said we almost weren’t embarrassments to the Ranger name, but not to get ahead of ourselves because it wasn’t over yet. I met a bunch of new guys in my Ranger platoon but my closest buddy was Kirk Meyers, and he was from Oklahoma. He lived the cowboy life I had grown up pretending in Tennessee. He kept all of us entertained for hours with his stories of cattle drives and wild nights out in whorehouses, which he would mention to use with an air of bravado, had sawdust on the floor and counted him as one of their best customers on weekends after getting paid. I knew most of the things he told us were bullshit, because privately he told me they were. He just liked the reactions of the guys when he’d spin a tall one. Him and I talked about anything and everything in our lives. We’d share letters from home, goodies from home, everything. We were in the same platoon from the start of Ranger training until deployment overseas and finally we went into combat together. I often think of Kirk, especially at night when it’s quiet. I have no doubt he’ll become a writer of the Wild West once this thing is over. I can remember he did something on D-Day that had situations been different, would have made me laugh. We came in as the first wave of invaders, and because Rangers lead the way!, it was our job to scale the cliffs of Pointe Du Hoc. As the grappling guns shot the ropes we were to climb up to the top of the cliffs, Kirk yelled at the sailor manning our gun that he had done better roping cattle at midnight while half drunk on whiskey. The sailor told him that if he thought he could do a better job than by god he could just get back here and try it, but our Lieutenant grabbed him by the strap of his pack as he headed back to show the swabby just how to rope. After that moment there wasn’t a lot to be cheery about that day. All I knew is that I had made a big mistake coming here as a Ranger. I should have gone to cook school.
It’s a lot darker here than it is at home. I guess you never realize it until you have seen more than one kind of dark. I was lucky to have grown up in the clean air of the country I guess, where seeing the stars at night was second nature and each one was like a tiny nightlight. There were a hundred times I can remember sneaking out of bed after midnight to go down to the river that ran along the edge of my grandparents land in order to catch brook trout as they rose and fed in the middle of the night. This was in the days before flashlights were commonplace, but the stars made it so bright out that it was like having a lighted path down and up. Nobody ever said anything about the sneaking in and out but I found out later that both Grandpa and Grandma knew every time I did it. I must have thought I was the sneakiest kid in the world if I really thought I was getting away with that much. I guess all the fresh fish made up for it. I’d usually just tell them I caught them fresh that morning, figuring that leaving out what time that morning wasn’t making it a lie just a little bit of half truth. I miss that kind of starlight right now. I can’t even see my hand in front of my face here. The complete lack of noise makes the dark seem even heavier. It’s not something you ever get used to, just put up with until it gets light again. Sure seems like the night lasts a long time though.
The summer I turned 17 is when I met Betty Lynn Price. She and her family moved to town from up north, around Chicago, where Betty’s daddy had worked in the steel mills. He had gotten hurt on the job and it turned out it was the companies fault and he was given a big settlement by the courts that allowed him to move his family down south to the country and live out his days in the peace and quiet of clean country air. Those are his words, not mine. I met Betty when Grandpa and I took his old Ford truck into the mechanic to have the transmission looked at. I had taken a list of things to get from the market from Grandma and walked over as Grandpa was haggling with the man at the garage about parts and labor costs. Betty was working the cash register and I almost dropped my groceries when I saw her. She was about the same height as I was which isn’t saying much for a short fellow like me, and blonde and beautiful. Her dimples showed when she smiled at tried to hide a giggle as I juggled my items to keep from spilling them. The older lady in line behind me just winked as I turned around to apologize for almost knocking into her. She’d seen how pretty a girl Betty was. To this day I don’t know how I got up the nerve to talk to her and finally got around to ask her to go see a movie with me. She said yes, but it’d have to be a daytime showing because she her father wouldn’t approve of a first date at night. She smiled as she said first date and I almost had to excuse myself and faint. The days passed by slowly until the next weekend when I was taking Betty to the movies. Until the day came that is. Then it went by so fast I was almost late because I got caught up helping Grandpa out in the barn. If it wasn’t for Grandma being so excited about the date and coming running out to tell me I had better get ready, I’d probably still be working on that damned tractor and Betty would be married off somewhere to some other guy. It was awkward, that first time out together. It was obvious that neither of us had a whole lot of dating experience and didn’t really know what to talk about. It seemed to me that we didn’t have much in common and it was almost a relief when the picture started and we could just watch it and not have to force a conversation. Betty had talked me into seeing a love story movie and I had only agreed because she was so pretty. If she’d asked I’d have eaten broken glass instead of popcorn and washed it down with turpentine. She’s the kind of girl that every time you see her, if it’s the first or the fiftieth you are just taken by her beauty. About half way through the picture she put her head on my shoulder and I have to tell you I almost died. I thought maybe there was a chance she wouldn’t run off after the picture and file the whole afternoon under a waste of time. I found out later she thought that is what I was going to do, and we both had a good laugh. That turned out to be the icebreaker we needed and we went to the drug store for a soda and ended up talking for hours until Betty looked up at the clock and noticed she was about two minutes away from curfew and a good long grounding. She told me to meet her at the movies the next day at the same time and we’d do it again. She kissed me on my cheek outside the store and took off in a sprint around the corner. She even ran pretty. Grandpa and Grandma didn’t say much when I got home but I could tell they were dying to know how it had gone, so I told them. Grandpa got a twinkle in his eye and was going on and on about me being a ladies man and that I must take after his side of the family. Grandma shushed him and told me how important it was to be a gentleman in front of a lady all the time no matter what. It’s a lesson I’ve never forgotten. The next day Betty Lynn was standing in front of the theatre and beside her stood a man who was a little shorter than she, with balding brown hair and holding a cane. I figured it must be her father who wanted to meet the fellow his daughter was going out on all these dates with. I was right. Mr. Price drilled me with so many questions in such a short period of time I finally had to interrupt him and ask him to slow down because I was just a country boy and I didn’t think as fast as a city man talked. This made him laugh and he said he wanted to buy us all lunch before the show. It turned out to be one of the most pleasant days the three of us had. Mr. Price was in a lot of pain from the injury he’d suffered to his leg and knee at the steel mill and he wasn’t usually up for even leaving the house for a long period of time. I was thankful every time he decided to venture out and visit with me. It’s different when someone comes to visit you and you can’t even get out of your bed because of some malady or another.
The first time I was wounded, in France, I wasn’t able to get out of my hospital bed when Kirk and a few other boys came around to see me once they were back in England after D-Day. Kirk had won himself a Silver Star and had come to show it off. I told him I had the Purple Heart and girls dug scars better anyways. We talked about fellows we had known in training who hadn’t made it back. It was hard to think about because we didn’t know when we’d have to go into combat again and the next time it could easily be us that didn’t come home. No good ever came from that kind of thought though. Once I was up and around and could get back with the boys we took on a new form of entertainment to ease our minds from the worries of the war. We started to torment the new recruits coming in to replace the guys we’d known. They were so smug, with their Ranger patches and swaggering around base like they were the toughest guys on earth. So we veterans upped our swagger and made sure when we talked to the new guys we stood close enough that our Combat Infantry Badges were in clear view. We told them they could think it all they wanted but we KNEW we were the toughest guys on the planet. So they’d better get in line behind us or there would be trouble. After a time we got to know a few of them and found out they were decent enough kids they just didn’t know **** about war. Nobody bothered to remind us that we were the same way when we’d first come to England. I wish now I’d taken the time to get to know more of them and to know them better. It seemed that the replacements were the first ones killed when the firing started. The manpower that war demanded was met by shortening up the training periods and the boot camps became more like mills churning out soldiers. I guess ten half trained soldiers is better than three fully trained, if you don’t take the numbers of new guys killed into account it almost adds up. Kirk and I stuck together like peas in a pod; we did everything together from drinking beer in the pubs to chasing girls in the dancehalls. It was almost a normal for a time back in England. I got regular letters from home and from Betty and things were peaceful. There was always the threat of heading back into the mix of combat, but for those of us that had already been there the down time was welcomed. The new guys were full of piss and vinegar and ready to go kick ass from France to Berlin then across the Pacific. Goddamned kids didn’t know what they were asking for.
We next went into the field in France, hopping from village to village doing all sorts of missions that needed crack troops that were tough enough to eat nails. Rangers were highly respected even by the senior officers because of the things we were able to get done. It was a tough bit of business, and we lost a lot of guys. It seemed the new guys were especially adept at getting the old hands into the **** and getting them wasted. Kirk almost bought it when a German anti-tank rocket landed directly in front of his machine gun but for some reason, it didn’t explode. When he was ordered to move his position to keep up with the flowing battlefield, he wasn’t fifty feet away from it when that bastard went off. Kirk shook it off as pure luck, but I knew better. The Hand of God had kept that explosive from going off because for a reason nobody knew, Kirk had bigger and better things to go onto than dying in a field in France outside of a village nobody had ever heard of, or even cared about.
I am religious by default of being born a Southern Baptist. I didn’t always follow in the way of the Lord but I’ve always known he’s with me and hopefully protecting me so I can go home again. I don’t know what His plan is but I know I’m included in it somehow.
I lost my ring somehow in this last scrap with the krauts. Betty Lynn is going to be awfully mad at me for that I’m sure. We were married six months before I was shipped out to England and I miss her so much it hurts me deep in my chest. I have to find that ring. It was her daddy’s and his daddy before that, and his before that. That’s a lot of family history lost someplace in the mud along this damned road. I hope when it gets light I can get out in the open and look for it. There has been a lot of shelling around here I just hope it’s not smashed into a billion pieces or buried so deep in the mud it’ll take years to come up. That’ll be a hard thing to explain. We had a beautiful wedding, on my Grandparents farm. The sun was shining and the birds were singing. That sounds kind of corny but that’s the way it really was. She looked so pretty in her dress with her hair all fixed up that it made me cry. I was crying like a little baby as she walked down the aisle towards me. I’ll never forget it. I had known for a long time that I couldn’t live without her in my life but as soon as I saw her in that moment I knew I’d just fall over and die without her. I can only hope she feels half as strongly about me. In my heart I know she does. I like to think that Heaven will look just like that day.
It was very hard to leave her and ship off into the unknown. She tried to be brave but I know how hard it was for her because it was a terrible hard thing for me to do. I kissed her like it was the last time and I patted her belly because we’d just found out she was pregnant with our first child. I just know it’s going to be a boy, and I hope we can raise him up right like I was raised. I do think we’ll be great parents. I just can’t wait to see his little face and teach him how to do just everything in the world. It’s an exciting thing to look forward to being a father. It’s not something I ever thought about before this but it seems all I can think of now. God I wish it would get a little bit lighter out, I just want to look at her picture. I keep it stuck in the lining of my helmet so it’s close to me at all times. Where the hell is my helmet anyways? I had it right here with me. I have to calm down and think. I was on the motorcycle and the mortars started falling in the road ahead of me, I went off the road…I must have crashed and hit my head. That’s why it’s so dark probably. I’ll shake off this grogginess and I’ll be back on my way. I need to think and remember what the hell happened. The rounds hit closer and I crashed. I remember looking up over the road…and a flash. Then nothing. Jesus why can’t I wake up? I have to calm down.
The last night we had at home was both amazing and gut wrenching. Betty Lynn grilled steaks and we had a small gathering at her parent’s house. My grandparents and parents came, and it was nice to have everyone together in one place. We did our best to make it a festive mood but I could tell by the looks on everyone’s faces that sadness was just below the surface. My grandfather, who was not a very emotional man pulled me aside after we’d eaten and gave me his pocket watch. He told me to always keep it set to the time at home, not the time where I was and that way a little bit of home could always be with me. I have done that to this day. Sometimes when I’m at my lowest points and the loneliness seems to cover up my whole heart I’ll take that watch out and I can see what time it is at home and can imagine what’s going on there. We are almost six hours ahead here and I know when it’s ten o’clock here that my family is just sitting down to a big home cooked meal and sometimes if I try hard enough I can almost smell the biscuits. I can’t get to my watch right now but my best guess would put it around 8 pm. Everyone is settling in for the night, getting ready to recharge after a long day. Grandpa is probably reading a western novel and Grandma is knitting something I’m sure. I like to always think that Betty is just getting out of the bathtub because she always smelled so good right after a bath, not like a person normally does when they are just clean either. A soft, new smell that was so delicate I was always afraid of trying to hard to smell it, as if just the act of enjoying it would drive it away. I hope she is thinking of me and missing me.
The reason that they send young men to war is because we have it in our heads that we are invincible and nothing can ever happen to us. Wars couldn’t be fought if older, wiser men had to charge into battle. I’ve seen men die horrible deaths here and I can’t help but think about them. I think back to the earlier wars and wonder if every young soldier like myself had the same thoughts that I’m having now. I think there is no way war can get uglier or more brutal than it is today. Machine guns, mortars, artillery, bombs falling from five miles up. It is a horrible thing to live with, yet I’m sure back as far as the wars between barbarian races was the same thing as weapons evolved. Nobody wants to die, that much is certain. I’ve seen both friend and foe cry out for God, their mothers, anyone, to just end the suffering. I remember now one young kid from my platoon, his last name was White…I can’t remember his first name, and that kind of bothers me…but White was killed in the most horrific manner. He stepped on a wooden mine; the Germans used wood for some of their mines because our detectors couldn’t pick them up during a sweep, and it blew his legs off right at the hips. There was nothing anyone could do for him, and the doc even used all his morphine surrettes to try and at least knock him out but it was no use. The pain kept him awake and alert and my God how he screamed and begged for someone just to shoot him. He cursed us, cursed the Germans and then he begged his mother to come get him to help him get up because he wanted to go home. Then he got quiet and his eyes widened and sort of focused. He said “Pull the wagon around the barn, Mark and I’ll meet you on the porch.” Then he died. Nobody knew what the hell he was talking about until a couple of days later when a group of us was discussing it around the mess wagon and one of White’s buddy’s told us that his brother Mark had been killed in an automobile accident a few years back. I guess White had gone home and his brother had welcomed him. I wonder if heaven is the best part of your life? Or just a collection of your best memories? My heaven would be home on the farm and it’d be always summer, filled with movies with Betty, mowing hay with grandpa and drinking lemonade on the porch with everyone. I could live that life forever, there is no doubt in my mind.
I can’t feel anything anymore. I feel sort of detached from my body, I hope to God I’m not paralyzed because I don’t think I could take that. No way could I live like that. Please don’t let it be that, because I’ll kill myself. I feel so frustrated I want to cry but I can’t even do that. Something is wrong with me and I don’t know how to fix it and make it right. Morning is coming though, I can tell that because it’s starting to get lighter. I can see it but it’s like I’m looking through a spyglass, everything is so far away. I hope it’s warmer today because I’m sure I’m shivering from the cold even though I can’t feel it. It is getting lighter; I can make out some shapes and see shadows. I think I see my helmet and my pack…no that can’t be mine there is someone wearing the pack. I was by myself, delivering messages to division. But that’s my pack. Now I can see him, it’s….
Oh my God. It’s me…I’ve been killed.
The Army finally brought him home in 1968. His body was recovered in Northern France when a man was clear cutting the edge of his fields in order to expand his crop boundary. There was only a skeleton remaining; along side it was a rusted helmet and a few metal pieces from a Thompson submachine gun. The dog tags on the body identified it. The family had a small service in the small cemetery in their hometown, where a pretty woman in her mid-forties laid flowers on the grave and a boy in his twenties looked detached. You could see the wrinkles at the corner of the woman’s eyes, earned by years of grieving and wondering. Wondering where her husband had gone, what had happened to him. The telegram simply said Missing In Action, then after a year was changed to Presumed Killed and awarded him a Bronze Star for valor under fire. It did nothing to bring him home though, and the woman and small son spent twenty-four years aching. She had remarried after six years but her second husband knew how her heart felt on this day and he left her at the graveside, to be alone in her memories.

 

Wow I didn't realize this was so small scale on the forum. Talent mod break it up? Posted on a whim after too much adult fun.