Grandpa was in the war

I didn’t spend a lot of time with my grandfather and we weren’t close but I knew him as a friendly old man. He died when I was young. I didn’t understand what was happening. I didn’t get what ‘sick’ meant in that setting.

After one visit to see him my mom told me my dad had cried the whole way home. My dad had driven, I’d sat in the backseat. I didn’t know he’d cried. More than that, I couldn’t imagine it. Now, maybe thirty years later, give or take, I now know that of course my dad has certainly cried - case in point, I at first wrote ‘at some point in his life’ - but I still can’t imagine it.

My grandfather was a Marine. I’d only ever heard my grandfather mention this in passing once. I’d said something like “I want to be a jet fighter pilot in the airforce.” My grandfather had replied “That’s great. Just don’t ever join the Marines. All they do is teach you how to fight and hurt people. They don’t teach you anything worth knowing.”

After my grandfather died, I heard some other stories from my dad, in bits and pieces, unpredictably.

‘One time my dad hung a rope down from a tree and he took a knife and threw it from twenty feet away and it stuck into the rope and pinned it to the tree.’

‘Grandpa fought in the islands against the Japanese. When he got sick he said he thought he got the brain cancer from the chemicals in the flamethrower. He used the flamethrower to set people on fire, he never liked to talk about it. After the war the government put him in a camp or something for people who had fought on the islands because they were afraid the people would go crazy. He broke out and they caught him and put him back.’

‘Don’t tell me I’m mean or harsh to you. You don’t know what mean and harsh are. I had to kneel on gravel. I got beat with extension cords. That’s harsh.’

My uncle would later tell my mom the kids would hide under the beds when their dad got home from work. She said me dad didn’t remember this.

My dad would sometimes talk about wishing he’d been old enough to go to Vietnam because veterans were tested and proved themselves and he wished he’d had that.

I spent a long time being angry with my dad and sometimes I still am but now I can imagine him as a kid, enduring what he did. And now I can imagine my grandfather, enduring what he did. It occurred to me today that one factor behind it all, one force adding energy that spurred the violence, was my grandfather’s experience in the war. So many people had similar experiences as well. It’s like a kind of mental pollution, like the government dumped all this poison into people’s minds and hearts just as it dumped all those chemicals into the air and water as a byproduct of killing so many people in the war. And that’s just one of the wars of the twentieth century.

(Thought of all of this today, put it together for the first time, when listening to the new Propagandhi song “Failed Imagineer.”)