SNAFU: Heroes: An Anthology of Military Horror

I nodded my agreement. Last I’d checked, police arrested people and locked them away for doing wrong; they didn’t drop bombs the size of VW Bugs on their houses and burn the forests away with Napalm. I took one of his cigarettes as he grabbed another of my beers. I was trying to quit, but it wasn’t easy. All of my willpower went to not blowing my top whenever my mother would look at me with a puzzled expression. She hadn’t been there. She couldn’t possibly understand what I’d been through. I had to remind myself of that fact everyday. She got that puzzled look a lot. It was her way of asking what was wrong without actually saying the words.

“It’s been two weeks, Eddie, and you aren’t getting calmer. You’re just getting quieter. I figure you need to get it off your chest before it crushes you.”

I knew what he was talking about, but I just didn’t know how to say it. I didn’t know how to look at another person, let alone my grandfather, and explain how much I’d done, or how much I’d seen. I think he knew that, too.

He opened my beer with the church key he kept in his pocket and he took a long pull. “Maybe I should go first, just to break the ice?”

I blinked at that. He had never told me a war tale and I fully expected he never would. I guess then was when I realized that I had become a part of a rather exclusive club. ‘The Survivors’ Club. Off in the distance, I could hear my mother starting to prepare dinner. The radio was playing and I suspect she couldn’t hear a word we said to each other. That was maybe for the best.

He told me about Normandy Beach and the sheer volume of death and artillery that day. I shivered as I listened. The tale was very familiar to me, even if the location was different. I told him about the Ho Chi Minh Trail and he listened in silence. We drank and smoked some more, toasting the names and memories of people we’d known that never made it back from their fights on foreign soil. By the time I’d finished, we were both buzzing and the sun had set.

My mother finished setting the table for dinner, but she never called. I suspect my grandfather had warned her about what he was going to do. I suspect she understood well enough to know that supper could wait for a while.

We traded tales of combat and bloodshed, as I imagine many veterans have done over the years. Some were stories that were almost happy little slices of humor in the middle of Hell. Most were not.

My mind was tired and my tear ducts were sore; I had done a lot of crying, though the tears were silent ones. Finally, when I was almost ready to call it a night, my grandfather told me his last war story. Even now, so long after it happened and after it was told, it still gives me shivers.

We had moved on to the worst of the things we had seen and the worst we had done, pulling up the dregs of our experiences and showing them to each other with a morbid sort of fascination. I let him know what I and the rest of my squad had done in a little village where we suspected the locals were on the side of the enemy. He didn’t look at me differently when I was done and I can never put into words how grateful I am for that simple fact.

He reached for his cigarettes again, and discovered the pack was empty. He reached for another beer and learned that they too were all gone. He shrugged and settled himself more comfortably in the wicker chair. “I reckon I should tell you about the Château,” he said. And in his voice I heard a dread that made even Normandy seem like a pleasant story.

I looked over at him, and saw him close those bright old eyes of his. His face looked as strained as it had when my grandmother died and when he heard about my father. I swallowed the fear I felt when I saw that look, and I nodded in the dark. “I guess maybe you should,” I said, in a voice I barely recognized as my own.

“I wasn’t any older than you are now; might have been a year or two younger. I know I’d just barely gotten through basic training when I got over to France. It wasn’t like I’d expected at all. There were places where the war had made its mark, to be certain, but there were places where you’d have never known anyone was capable of even picking a fight. I’d seen a bit of both.”

He looked at me and his mouth smiled tightly, though his eyes stayed just as dark and stormy. “Met me a few fine women when I was over there, too. Some of them were very grateful to see a bunch of Yankees with supplies. But that ain’t what this here story’s about, is it?