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My mother's dad joined the Army because all of his friends did. It was less out of a sense of duty than a wish to fall in with the crowd. It's not that he wasn't a patriot, but joining wasn't his idea, just one to which he subscribed.
He was sent to Europe and fought in World War I. My mother doesn't know too many details; the war was long over by the time she was born, and the stories she passes on to me were mostly passed on to her in the same way, remotely and with an abundance of vagueness.
My grandfather's experience in the war came to an abrupt end. Well, it seems abrupt now, looking back on it. At the time it was probably a tortuous eternity. He was pierced through the leg with (depending on who tells the story -- different family members relate different details) a bullet or a bayonet. When I hear the story, I feel conflict in that detail. I can't believe that either item entering and exiting my knee would be preferable to the other, but the trauma of being run through at close range with a bayonet is far more horrifying to me than that from being punctured by a bullet. (The psychological implications of the former conjure nightmares of close combat while the latter strikes me as at least emotionally manageable.)
The Army surgeon insisted on an immediate amputation, but my grandfather refused. He was going home with his leg, goddamn it. The wound was apparently sufficient for the surgeon to presume that, without an amputation, my grandfather would die. He was placed against a wall with the other soldiers who were also expected to die or who had already expired. Essentially, the man who had not yet become my mother's father was, by the wartime standard of the day, a goner.
Needless to say, he did indeed survive. The joke passed around to my mother by all her relatives (and there were many -- the man left for dead produced, with his wife, eleven daughters and two sons) was that the Army had run short of blood for transfusions and relied on mule blood, hence her stubbornness.
My grandfather, whom I met only as a toddler and whom I remember only because there is a photo of me on his knee -- perhaps even the one wounded in Europe -- never sought further medical attention for his injury. He hobbled the rest of his life, trying to accommodate the handicap with custom shoes and determination. Mom can remember seeing the wounds when she was still very young. He'd show the kids the holes on either side of his knee, one for the entry, one for the exit. Beyond that, he didn't say much of it.
Mom told me this story again today because I called her after running some errands around town. Outside a store in the suburbs I was approached by two men handing out cloth poppies for Veterans Day. I greeted the man closest to me but told him immediately I had nothing in my pockets to contribute to his collection pot.
"That's all right," he said. "We don't need your money. Just take a poppy now and think of us on Tuesday."
I took the flower and wound the wire stem through a buttonhole. When I got home, I called her just to talk and because I knew her father served in the Army, just as my father/her husband served in the Air Force.
"You know, during World War II, my mom would go out and sell poppies by the side of the highway," she said, recalling her childhood in southern California. "One day, she collapsed from heat stroke because she refused to take a break."
Had I heard that story out of context, I'd have wondered what my grandmother's obsession was. But knowing the history of the man she married, it makes all the sense in the world.
"I never knew what the poppies were all about," Mom told me. "What's the significance?"
No one ever taught me this fact, and it never even occurred to me until she asked the question, but I immediately replied, "They were mentioned in the poem 'In Flanders Fields,' which was written to commemorate the Belgian countryside that holds so many dead soldiers from World War I." I recited the few lines I know by memory:
In Flanders Fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
The lines came to me so easily because they are part of a song I've long adored, but I don't know how they came back at that moment to me or how I associated them so quickly with her question about poppies. But through the stories about her father and his flirtation with death -- the very real possibility that he may have easily been among those for whom the poppies are given today, and the fact that he was not killed being quite directly responsible for the existence of my mother, me, and our conversation today -- I don't doubt that the connections I made were not my own, but rather were merely the result of ninety years of fate, guts, determination, and common history.
Bless you, veterans.
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