A Veteran's Day Wish

When I was a freshman in high school we had to do a report on World War II. We had the option of interviewing someone we knew who was in the war, or even having them come to address the class. By that point in my life I knew just a little bit about my grandfather’s service: he was an Army Ranger who landed on Normandy on D-Day. He received a Purple Heart after being shot in the leg while fleeing a Nazi ambush. And, well, that was pretty much it. Even that I only knew from my father or my uncle, as my grandfather never spoke of it. I’ll chalk this up to being a self-absorbed teenager, but I also never grasped the significance of what even those two details I knew really meant.

I was excited, though, for the opportunity to learn more. It never dawned on me that my grandfather didn’t talk about the war because he truly didn’t want to talk about it. I always assumed it was just because he was of that generation that simply didn’t talk about such things, born of the kind of humility that underlies any meaningful sacrifice: be willing to give all of oneself, to the point of death, while doing everything possible to avoid the glory that might go along with it.

This was different, however. For one, I was his grandson, and he could never say no to me. Second, I wasn’t asking him to speak of his own achievements, only to give a sense of what the war was like, which I assumed would be harmless enough. Truthfully, though, I couldn’t wait for him to share his stories so that I could sit there with pride as I watched my classmates wrapt in attention at the real life hero standing right in front of them, the hero I got to call Grandpop.

It was jarring, then, when Grandpop said no. He didn’t offer a reason, he didn’t say he had something else to do that day. He only said, “No, Michael, I don’t think so. I’m sorry.”

I’m sure I was disappointed, for purely selfish reasons, but if I was those feelings were pushed aside by my newfound desire to get to know this man more intimately than I had before — no easy task. I began paying attention to signs for how things might have affected him. During those rare instances when he made reference to the war, which was always for the purpose of sharing some other story where the war only happened to be the place where the events occurred, I hung on every word, and also paid attention to any body language or other signals he might give, trying to get some clues as to what was going on inside this man I loved so dearly. And unlike before, after he did share a story, when back at home, lying in bed, I would contemplate the greater significance, the psychological and spiritual toll that this took on my grandfather.

One story illustrates this perfectly, and it’s one he told several times. It’s the most detail he’s ever revealed about what the war was actually like, and he only shared it because of its relationship to something else. My grandfather had thick, opaque fingernails. Whether there was an underlying medical condition, I don’t know. But my grandfather insisted that he knew exactly what had happened. He had been in hand-to-hand combat with a German soldier, and during the fight the German bit his finger. According to my grandfather, the soldier was carrying some sort of poison in his mouth that permanently affected his fingers.

Now, I could be wrong, but I’ve got a strong suspicion that my grandfather was wrong on this one. But to me that didn’t matter. To me, it was the greater implications of that story that highlighted what war was like for him and what he had to face, and what kind of indelible effect it seemed to have left on his soul. If my grandfather was involved in hand-to-hand combat with a German soldier, and my grandfather was here telling a story about it, what is the most likely outcome of that encounter? It’s possible the soldier escaped. It’s possible some intervening event broke up the fight. Neither is likely, however. What is likely is that my grandfather killed that soldier, possibly with his bare hands. While I’ve never killed anyone, I am certain that this takes a toll on a man’s soul. We were created for life, not death, and even though the existence of evil has made killing necessary in some cases, like here, that doesn’t change the fact that in his innermost depths my grandfather had to grapple with the fact that he just killed a man. And that’s the only one I know about. The odds of it being the only approach zero.

My grandfather died in December 2012, and being alone with him in the middle of the night is a moment I will cherish for the rest of my life. During his final hours with my family and I gathered around his hospital bed, we got a glimpse into just how deeply affected he was. While under the influence of a healthy dose of morphine, my grandfather began to play out various scenes from his life. Some were sweet, like when he met my grandmother, his Rosie. Some were funny, like when he accused his best friend of cheating during a poker game. Some, however, were horrifying, as he re-lived, just hours before his death, the nightmares of that war, the bombings, the gunfire, brothers dying before his eyes, and much worse. To say it was difficult to watch is an understatement, but that tiny glimpse still gave us no understanding of what it was like to live. How could it?

At the luncheon after his funeral my great aunt shared a story that no one in my family, including my father, had ever heard. She was living with my great-grandparents when my grandfather returned from the war. She said that for the first year or so after his return there were many nights when he would wake up and start running all around the house, screaming, with terror in his eyes. No one who knew my grandfather could even picture this scene. It’s just so contrary to the cool, collected, albeit sometimes short-tempered man we all knew and loved. This sort of loss of control, confusion, panic, and hysteria was unfathomable.

At the time of the Second World War it was just called “shell shock.” Today we call it PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder. While more has been written about it and it is spoken of more frequently today than in decades past, we as a nation are not doing nearly enough. It’s been nearly 45 years since the end of the Vietnam War, and to this day as many as 30% of all veterans of that conflict suffer from PTSD. As many as 20% of veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are afflicted. This illness — which is what it is, a form of mental illness, which can be treated and managed with the appropriate resources and support — contributes to higher rates of poverty and suicide. People with PTSD experience higher rates of divorce.

To put this bluntly, until we commit ourselves to doing all that we can, to making this the highest priority, we are sending our young men and women to the horrors of war and asking them to sacrifice themselves to keep us safe and to keep us free, and we thank them by offering them a diminished quality of life because of the very thing we’ve asked them to do.

I wish I had the answers, but I don’t. I only know that we dishonor our veterans by not providing the greatest support possible for their reentry into civilian life. In some cases that may involve sending support services directly to their home, because we know one reason veterans do not receive care is because nothing is available nearby. I would like us to rethink the role of the Veteran’s Administration in providing medical and psychiatric care. Whatever the answers are, we will continue to dishonor our veterans, and we will never be able to call ourselves patriots, if we continue to allow them to suffer in silence.

Today is not only about those who suffer the most. Today is about all who have served our nation honorably, and so the parades and the fireworks and the celebrations are all warranted, and then some. But there is a greater day to look forward to, a greater day to celebrate — aside from the day when war is no more — and that is the day when we show all of our veterans the care and compassion that they deserve. Only then will we have fulfilled our patriotic duty. Only then will we have honored our veterans well. Only then will November 11 be a day for which we can not only be proud of those who served and protected us, but we can be proud of ourselves, as well.