명. 고맙습니다 (Thank You)

My father's war was not a war, officially, but only a "conflict." He's never called it anything but what it was, on the rare occasions that he's ever said a word about it. Like most men of his generation, perhaps like most men who have been to war, my father saw nothing in war that he wished to remember, certainly nothing he cared much to share.

The few stories I've heard -- of the troop carrier where every man was sick for days and weeks, of frozen K-rations at Thanksgiving, of a prank that left him trapped in his bunk in a snowbank, where he nearly died of the cold, of the deadly efficiency of the Turks his unit followed into a captured position, of finding a brass incense burner in the wall of a foxhole, -- none of these brief anecdotes told me much of what he actually saw in Korea, of what it must have been like there, for a green boy, never before away from his hometown in Pennsylvania.

When I asked him once, directly, what the war meant to him, he said "it meant nothing," and left it at that.

He's never spoken of what it was like to kill another human being, though I know he did. I know that the thought of it, and of all the death he saw in the war, the one time in my company that he could not keep the memory of all that from his mind, undid him, a sight I'd never seen before and have never seen since.

He told my mother, when he came back home to marry her, only that he was glad to be home, and with her.

Some years ago, at one of the perpetual yard sales with which my father has supplemented his meager retirement pension, he came down off the porch to help a couple of customers looking through the stuff he'd arranged on tables in front of the garage. He watched them for awhile first, not wanting to make them feel shy of just looking, until he happened to hear these two young men, "college boys," my father guessed, speaking a language he hadn't heard in years, a language he hadn't thought to ever hear again.

When he said hello to them, in Korean, they were understandably startled. When they returned his greeting and tentatively tried his memory with a little more, he smiled, and told them that that was about all he could actually say now in their language, though he "remembered the sound of it." The three of them stood there in my father's yard and smiled at one another.

They asked him, in English, if he had been in Korea? He told them, he had. They asked him, had he been in the war? He told them, yes, he'd been in the war. They asked him, much to his surprise and embarrassment, if they might take a photograph, with him? He said, he couldn't imagine why they would want "a picture with an old man," but they were gently insistent, and so he let them have their picture. He wouldn't let them buy anything, though they tried, and they wouldn't let him give them anything from the tables. The stalemate made them all smile again, even laugh a little. Finally, they turned to leave, and as they did, they bowed, stiffly and very low, and my father remembered another word or two of Korean:

"명. 고맙습니다 ," -- "Thank you," they'd said. They said it again and again, until my father waved them away, and went back up onto the porch and watched them get in their car and drive away.

"That meant something," he told me, "that right there."

War is Kind

Daily Dose

From The Red Badge of Courage, by Stephen Crane

SCARS

"Scars faded as flowers."

Gold Star

Memorial Day, for my father's family, has always been difficult. My father is a veteran of the Korean Conflict. His brother, Dale, served in the occupying force in Japan. Neither came away from their service the same. But far more even than what either saw abroad, it was an earlier loss that changed them, and their family most. My grandmother, Lella Belle Sopher Craft, was a Gold Star Mother. My father and his brother lost their elder brother in World War Two, my grandparents lost their eldest son, Richard Craft.

My Uncle Dick died in the Battle of the Bulge, though I don't know that he knew he was in any such thing. From what I've read of the battle, few of the Americans killed the day my uncle was knew what was happening. As I remember it, he was driving a jeep, the jeep was hit by a mortar and Dick was killed. I never knew him. My Uncle Dale, "Red," I knew well enough and liked as best I could. Before his death a few years ago, I listened to his stories of the war and after with a scandalized awe, as most involved fistfights, whores and shore-leave. Red was a sailor. My father, a quieter, more sensitive man than his brother Dale, has almost never told the stories of his war. Neither ever spoke of their brother Dick with anything other than respect and affection. The oldest boy, he was to them something of an ideal; handsome, gentle, strong and affectionate, riding horses with them, hunting, looking after his younger brothers. Red fought with everybody and bullied my father until my father finally hit him with a 2 by 4 one day and knocked him cold. Even Red admitted he probably deserved it. I don't know that I ever heard of my Uncle Dick fighting anyone but the Nazis.

I did not know my Grandpa Craft. He died when I was still a toddler. If the death of his son changed him, and how could it not have done? it seems to have only made him older, sadder and more fond of the sons that survived. My Grandma I knew and loved as well as I've ever known anyone. I can't say that I ever understood the woman, but knowing from an early age, the meaning of the Gold Star she permanently displayed in her home, I believe I always understood enough to find her forgivable, even when she wasn't.

Every Memorial Day in my childhood was marked by my Grandmother attending a service at which was displayed a portrait of her son Richard that used to be displayed at the American Legion Post in Blacktown, Pennsylvania. That Legion Hall is gone, as is the larger portrait, burned to the ground years ago, though, blessedly, not in my grandmother's lifetime. My father has the original photograph of his brother in uniform from which the portrait was made.

My father's loss is such that he can not contemplate Memorial Day without such a deep sadness, even now, as to make the whole of this day dark. It will be so for him so long as he lives.

For me, on this day, I will always think of the Gold Star in my Grandma Craft's parlor. Some well meaning soul, when I was a teenager, once pointed to the little banner by the grandfather clock and said to Grandma, "You must be very proud."

"I'd rather have had my son," she said.

Amen.

Daily Dose

From The Complete Poems of Thomas Moore

Memorial Day

"Peace to each manly soul that sleepeth;
Rest to each faithful eye that weepeth..."

From How Oft Has the Banshee Cried