Audience to a seldom spoken story

Months ago, I received a phone call from a local veteran who suggested a column featuring our American heroes -- those soldiers who faced war's battlefields to never return home -- or those whose return was marked by the scars of lost limbs and paralysis. 

 

Despite my conversation with the surviving veteran, research that followed, and numerous hours recrafting this column, I repeatedly collided with my failure in capturing the essence of war's sacrifice -- a sacrifce that grants us today's celebrated freedoms.

 

As I've reflected on my conversation with this local veteran, and grappled with putting such plight into words, I've recognized that there are no words that adequately channel the emotional wreckage of war.  

I am humbled by the incomprehensible courage it commands to die in battle.  Although I strive to envision what my grandfathers, or this anonymous veteran,  faced in war's hell,  I'll never understand the advancing enemy's attack, nor grasp the cry of a fellow comrade exploding into a confetti of red, white and army green. 

 

"What do you think about when you know you're going to die?" the local veteran asked during our conversation, remembering a young soldier who awaited death's defeat following a gunshot wound to the head.  With no nearby medical unit, the veteran recalled, the soldier sought the solace of a cigarette, while life's blood drained with the drags of his smoke.   

 

And as I've considered this veteran's question, asked not necessarily of me but to the echoes of war's wandering ghosts, I can only imagine such panicked final thoughts were most certainly a prayer of, "God save me ... I don't want to die."

Our war heroes answered a sometimes unavoidable fate, not by choice, but by Uncle Sam's draft card.

 

"They were only boys," the veteran paused, recounting the many 18 and 19 year-old fallen soldiers whose last breaths were not in the farm fields of home, but on foreign battle fields.  "They'd barely lived life."  

Scribbling shorthand as our discussion ended, I asked the veteran when we could talk again.

"I can't do that," he choked, followed by the click of his receiver.

And as I dropped the silenced phone from my ear, I realized that regardless of war's waving surrender flags, the battle never dies in a soldier's mind.

Published in The Daily Dispatch, May 30, 2010