WWII: Dodging that Bugle
Today I’ll dodge the bugles — not turn on the television set, walk out of the room during the news broadcast — because I can no longer hear the bugler blow “Taps” without crying. Oh yes, I set my jaw. I tell myself I won’t do it this time. And still the hot tears roll down my cheeks unbidden and uncontrollable.
Since my father died Veteran’s Day is an intensely personal commemoration for me and a difficult one — the lone trumpets, the rifle salutes, the missing man formation. It is a confusing feeling of pride and pain so intimately intermingled I cannot begin to separate one from the other.
On the wall here beside me in my study is a framed photographic arrangement of eight men. My Uncle Louis starts the assemblage, a 17-year-old boy who volunteered for the American Expeditionary Force and served as a machine gunner in the Argonne in World War I. Uncle Alf was at the Battle of the Bulge in World War II and Papa flew bombers in North Africa and Italy. Uncle Curly was a telegraph operator, Uncle Jack served in the Army, and my cousin Junior died in the South Pacific when the plane on which he was a bombadier was shot down. Cousin Alf flew Hellcats for the navy and his little brother Charlie was in the Marines.
They are my people. My soldiers. The descendants of men who fought for the Confederacy in the American Civil War. Southerners to a man, they put their country first, over dreams and sweethearts, safety and security. We’ve taken to calling them the “greatest generation,” but I know my Dad wouldn’t have liked that. Often when I gaze at this photo my eyes fall on my cousin, the boy who went to war and came home in a casket after the fighting stopped. (I’ve written about him before.) He was a handsome young man and I wish I’d had a chance to know him.
For so many World War II vets we have only the fragments of their fight, the letters home, the stray photos. And we have the bugles that blow the sad notes of “Taps,” — we have tears intermingling memories both happy and sad. On this Veterans Day — still Armistice Day in my mind — I wish the guns could truly fall silent around the world.
WWII, WWI, World War I, World War II, Veterans Day, Armistice Day
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