I wasn't there, but I grew up close enough to it to have realized the significance and the consequences.Friday marks the 60th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
Growing up, I heard stories about it. My father's twin brother served in the Pacific in World War II - a Marine recruitment poster, live and upclose in my post-war living room - and though he never talked about his personal experiences landing at Leyte Gulf in the Philippines, and Attu and Kiska in the Aleutians, he did stammer through a story or two of Navy personnel aboard ships he was on, Middies who were at Pearl Harbor on that fateful day.
In Oregon's field
Looking back, I am aware of the toll that war took on him. He stuttered. (My father assured me that he had no such speech defect before the war.) He drank excessively. (That explained the dark, smoky odor I picked up when he bounced me on his knee - although to me that was just part of his being different, part of his magic, the stuff of my personal hero.) He was easily startled by sudden noises. (I found the irregularity an utter delight, even when he cautioned me against creating the disturbance.) Some mornings he would emerge from the spare bedroom dressed in his Marine dress uniform. (He glistened with medals and insignia - it didn't seem odd to me - and was at least a foot taller on those mornings when he would walk through the fields behind the house, alone, with me trailing at a respectful distance.)
Hard medals
My uncle launched me on a youthful infatuation with war. After all, video games and Sylvester Stallone were far down the lamentable road to the future, and Uncle Art had my undivided attention.
He died soon - complications of alcohol consumption, they said. I figured he died of the weight of that silver star and two oak leaf clusters. Heroes didn't die from drinking. That was how poets and politicians popped their clogs. Still, it was a sad time around the house. My father cried - for the first and last time as far as I know.
But that sadness only served as the mortar to the house of battle that was building inside me.
I had peach cheeks, muddy pants, and packed all of 8 years; but I was also 40-years-old, grizzled and grimy. I was every gunnery sergeant who ever slid into a pair of battle fatigues, and recruited Curt and Gary - my neighbors and partners-in-kiddy-crime - into my service.
It didn't hurt that at the time our kid's war broke out my father was building a fireplace. That chore required a large pile of sand to be deposited in the vicinity of the house, and smack dab on the shores of Iwo Jima.
Licorice as Luckies
We three had M-1 rifles that, from an adult perspective, probably looked like Louisville Sluggers. But the way the fat end of the bats snuggled into our shoulders, they were unerring government-issue weapons of war. We hit the shores of that desert island with the force of a Marine division. We withstood wave after wave of enemy attacks, repelling them with the steady rat-tat-tat of our bats.
We'd pass the packet of black licorice, biting the stringy bits into a manageable size, in order to fake a smoke break between encounters. After securing the beach and driving the enemy into the jungle - the pear orchard - we'd walk through the neighborhood to the cheers of the local citizens we had so justly liberated.
It was the innocence of the times grimly set in relief against the tapestry of a recent war. Little did we know at our green, 8-year-old trade that we were training for a war yet to come - a war that one day might make it difficult to talk without a hitch.
Arthur, Arthur
Tomorrow's commemoration will remind me of Uncle Art - all that was left of him - and all he left me.
By Larry Berteau
