The annual Veterans Day ceremonies always take me to another place and time, back to Elliott County of the mid-1940s when the men came home from the war.
World War II, of course.
My father and four uncles all served in the military, though Uncle Paul was already there, monitoring radios on a remote Pacific island the Sunday that Pearl Harbor was bombed.
That was the day after my brother Roger, named for Paul (Rodgers), was born. They didn’t tell my mother we were at war until two of her brothers were getting ready to leave for the Army. One went to Africa, fought through Italy and into France before getting hit in a French farmyard and eventually sent home near the war’s end. Her other brother was sent to the South Pacific.
Daddy left just after I was born, late in 1943, and for the next two years my father was the sailor in the picture on the mantle. When he did come home, after D Day and the Allied victory, walking all the way from Olive Hill after his midnight train arrived, I tried to run him off.
He wouldn’t go. We gradually adjusted.
Uncle Kenneth came home after spending about a year in a German prison camp, bombed so often that for a couple of years Kenneth took cover whenever a plane flew over.
I remember Uncle Allen Cox, back from fighting in the Pacific islands, happy to be home with a gold tooth and a yellow Cadillac convertible. Uncle Stanley was healing from a gunshot through the jaw.
They all used to gather at our house in Bluebank after we moved to Fleming County. Paul, the Naval officer, was nearly a twin to my father and had the same white, flashing teeth and wavy hair, and my last memory of him was when he told me and Roger that he’d send us both through college.
Didn’t know what a college was, at the time, but it sounded great.
But Paul, after surviving the war and all the hell it created, was reported missing in November of 1948, a 40 year mystery that finally turned out to be some sort of a spy expedition to Korea that left no trace of planes, debris, or bodies. Grandma always said the Russians had Paul, and she may have been right.
Every Sunday we were all in Elliott County at Grandma’s house, where my stepgrandfather Sam Leedy and his dog Red had been my wartime buddies, where I was to spend many summers, and where always, when the men gathered, the talk was of the war. Where they had been, what they had seen, and sometimes, if they thought no kids were listening, some of what they’d been through.
Kenneth’s tales of prison camp were both horrible and hilarious, an 18-year-old mountain kid surviving the Nazi punishment, staying alive by eating potato peelings, coming out as a frail skeleton.
I once rode with Kenneth in an Army surplus Jeep on his mail route, down Sinking Creek Road back when it was mostly creek and rocks, a daylight-to-dark journey that today could be finished in less than an hour, picking up the mail in Carter County and bringing it back up the cliffs for distribution. In time, he and Uncle Allen moved away, to industrial Ohio, the route so many young veterans took.
Mostly, I remember how happy everybody was to just be alive, still young in years, back home after helping win the most awful war, with kids and food everywhere and a future once again full of promise.
Most of the greatest generation are gone now, plus some of us, and in many ways life has been as good as the young soldiers and sailors thought it would be. The wars never stopped, though, and young people never stopped leaving home and going into danger.
Probably, they never will.
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