SNAFU: Heroes: An Anthology of Military Horror

Now and then, mostly when I closed my eyes, I got a nice flash back of growing up in Summitville. I got glimpses of Antoinette Sanderson’s incredible green eyes when we shared out first kiss or even a sight of her perfect breast the one time I’d seen it. I got a look at the Halloween Festival in Town Square, and remembered the fun we all had building the scarecrows that stood like sentinels around the festivities. But those were rare, just enough to keep me sane. Mostly I saw the dead and the dying in rivers of blood. It was ‘kill or be killed’ over there, as my sergeant was fond of saying, and I did far too much killing to ever be happy about having survived.

But I did discover a way to numb the pain for a while, a way to crush the overwhelming guilt of surviving when so many people who were braver or just plain more innocent than me died in screaming increments. I discovered booze. Beer was my preference and Budweiser the drink of choice. I didn’t sip and savor the beer I consumed. I drank it fast, hoping for numbness from the darkness I felt growing inside of me.

I never quite made it to alcoholic, but it wasn’t for lack of trying.

My grandfather put a stop to that nonsense before it could go too far. I was sitting out on the porch about two weeks after I got home when he decided it was time to set me straight. Two weeks, and already all of my dreams had been shattered. Toni Sanderson was off in college, and even though I didn’t speak to her, it was made very clear to me that she was seeing someone else and it was serious. I’d almost managed to figure that part out anyway; the letters, which were so frequent when I’d first left for the war, were less common and often seemed almost too friendly. I could read between the lines as well as anyone else. She sent the last few either out of a misplaced sense of guilt or out of a need to keep me from feeling lower than I already did. I couldn’t even see her to put what was left of our relationship to rest with a proper funeral. Not unless I felt like driving to Denver, and I was afraid to do that because one of the faces I’d seen calling names when I got off that damned plane and looked around had looked an awful lot like Toni’s. If I’d found out she had been one of the protesters, it would have been too much for me. I was wise enough to know that much at least.

No girl waiting for me when I got back, not like in the pictures in Time and Life magazines. No victory parades, not even a hero’s welcome. I just stepped back into my life as best I could. I wasn’t very good at it, either; I started drinking and taking out my frustrations on the people closest to me. I roared at my mother when everything wasn’t just so, and it was seldom just so, you may rest assured. I glowered at my grandfather, feeling that he should have prepared me better for the madness of war, though the thought was never that well cemented in my head at the time. I ignored the rest of Summitville. They were not worth my time: they had not welcomed me back with open arms, but merely nodded and went on their way, embarrassed I suppose, to have a soldier come back intact.

So beer became my one true friend and I left the rest of the world to fend for itself.

My grandfather would have none of it. As I watched the sun do its slow descent toward Lake Overtree, he moved arthritically over to the chair next to mine and settled himself in. It took a while; though he walked very well on his fake leg, sitting and standing were still a challenge. I did my best to ignore him. He lit a Camel, blowing the smoke out with a satisfied gust of wind past his dentures, and then reached down next to me to take one of my beers. I wasn’t feeling too greedy just then, so I let him.

He finished two cigarettes and two more beers while the sun tried to hide behind the lake and mountains. It was properly twilight before he started speaking. “Reckon you’re feeling a mite sorry for yourself.” I looked his way. He hadn’t called me Eddie since I was old enough to grow peach fuzz on my chin.

“Maybe I am, Grampa. Maybe I’m just trying to get my balance back.” Oh, it was just the right sort of pop psychology my grandfather could understand. I’d picked up the term from him, after all. He most often used it to refer to someone who was in mourning for a close family relative. “Emma needs to get her balance back is all,” he’d say when someone made a comment about how poorly she was faring after her husband died in a bad car wreck. “She’s had a rough time, and it ain’t always an easy thing to start standing up again.”

He lit another Camel from the butt of the third, and cupped his hand around the cherry. He’d picked up that habit during WWII and had never stopped hiding that small source of light from potential snipers. “Yeah, I can see how you might need to. Everything I’ve heard says it’s a nasty conflict over there. They can call it a ‘police action’ all they want to, but you and I know better, don’t we?”