Something 4 The Weekend # 205

Drive-By Truckers: Decoration Day: "Decoration Day" [mp3]

Grandpa Frank was too young for WWI, and too old for WWII... Either that or he got a medical stay. The man was tall and skinny, seemingly frail, though he walked all over the city of Milwaukee, and was known to ride his bike from the city to Sheboygan and back in a day. All I know is he never served and never said why he didn't. Grandpa Frank probably could have served in Europe, but instead he made boots for the army. Somewhere I have all the ledgerbooks he kept of the boots he made for the war, and the shoes he cobbled in his basement (on the side, in the evenings) for his neighbors and family.

Grandpa Frank had two shoeboxes full of black and white photographs from THE WAR... WWII... He was a proud German, and he was a proud member of the Socialist Party Of America, and even though we sat together under the elm in his backyard and pored over all those photos of soldiers, weary or dead, all those cities destroyed, I believe my grandpa was nothing else but sad about the war. "Shameful", he often said, shaking his head. Germany had disappointed him by allowing Hitler, and of course all the death that followed. On the homefront, the Socialist Party's ambivalence about the whole thing essentially destroyed the party in fast fashion, leaving my grandpa once again disillusioned, so he made army boots and bought war bonds so that there could be more death.

My dad served in Korea in the years after the Korean War and before Vietnam. His time there consisted of playing on the Army's table tennis team, like Forrest Gump, and travelling around the Asian Pacific buying cameras, electronics and recording equipment. Then he came home and married my mom.

My uncle Mark did two tours of Vietnam. He got shot in the arm the first time around, and a grenade exploded about 30 feet away from him on his second run through the jungle, leaving him deaf in one ear and with a bunch of shrapnel scars on his neck and arm that look like so many little white worms crawling around. My cousin Chico has his helmet, pitted and scarred and splattered with what looks like tar. Uncle Mark was genuinely spooked and weird and reckless after the war. He smoked a ton of weed and drank too much, and on the 4th of July and/or for no reason whatsoever, he would fire off tracer rounds over the lake at Grandpa's cottage and tell stories a 10 year old nephew shouldn't have to hear. He eventually quit drinking, and mostly does mysterious things in his basement that includes smoking weed. I hope it's his autobiography.

Hotcha! Hank