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Grandpa and the War

I used to think Grandpa was weird and I never really liked him. He didn't
measure up to what I thought a grandpa should be like, you know the kind in
story books and movies. His chin was clean shaven so there was nothing to catch
ice cream in. U saw a movie once where an old man - he had to have been a
grandpa - got stuff caught in his beard all of the time.) Standing at 5'10" he was
shorter than lots of men.

I missed the stories, too; the tales of the olden days when there were sleighs
and two cent candy bars. Grandpa only spoke of the war. Looking back, I think
that's where his life had really left him - mentally. World War II had taken him
away from the States and he was put down in the jungles of Panama among the
mosquitoes that carried malaria and the snakes that hung from tree branches
staring down at passers-by. These were the things my grandpa told me about, but
not the things I wanted to hear as a little girl. I liked the three bears and the
Cookieman that ran down the lane, not guns and snakes and cold nights.

And my grandpa got angry sometimes. If he misplaced his keys or his glasses
were missing or there was anything else he couldn't find, he was certain someone
had come in the house and taken them. "TIley"would even take his crossword
puzzle pencils just to annoy him. I l1stened to this anger and it often frightened
me to think a person would come into Grandma and Grandpa's house to take
things from them. Some nights I lay in bed, afraid to move for fear someone had
gotten into the house and would find me sleeping there; maybe they would kill me
or take me, too, from Grandpa.

I see now it was the war that made Grandpa say all these things. No one came
into the house and stole from him; his memory just let him forget where he had
put his glasses and keys and whatever else happened to be missing. It wasn't
until I was years older and the movie producers found that Vietnam was a hot item
for the rum industry that I understood why Grandpa was the way I remember him.
In the theater watching Platoon and Full Metal Jacket a new world opened up to
me, a world that was certainly beyond any child's imagination. There were
soldiers, young boys with crazed eyes, who didn't know the enemies from the
allies. And others lost arms to bombs and sanity to deaths - to the mangled
bodies of friends that lay abandoned, face down in pools of muddied water mixed
Withblood. The few that came out alive were lucky and those that came out
mentally undisturbed were luckier and fewer still. My eyes saw Grandpa in these
mOviesand I longed to tell him how I understood the terror of war and what it had
left in his mind.

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