By Linda Lee Greene, Author & Artist
Christmas
Eve of 1941 in the mess hall of Ft. Knox, Kentucky Training Center was nothing like
home for the young US Army recruits, but they decorated a tree and wolfed-down
a traditional dinner of turkey, pie, cake, and all the trimmings. Early that
morning, Buck Private Bob Gaffin had rummaged through the contents of the
locker he had been assigned, trying to decide what to pack in anticipation of
receiving a four-day pass. Jammed into the locker were bed clothes, overcoat,
raincoat, two wool uniforms, two suntan shirts and tie, three wool suits,
underwear, two pairs of shoes, one pair of overshoes, six pairs of socks, one
combat suit, one pair of gloves, and toiletries, not to mention one tent, one
first-aid kit, one shell belt, one mess kit, and more to come. This
unsophisticated farm-boy, who owned far far fewer personal articles than this
enormous cache, felt he had hit the jackpot. In a letter to his family he expressed
a profound sense of stewardship for all the materiel issued to him by the
military. I sure have to be careful with
it, he wrote. In the end, he packed his haversack lightly—just enough to
get him through a long weekend at his parent’s farm in tiny Peebles, Ohio.
Stuffed inside were the clothes he had worn the day he was inducted into the
Army at Ft. Thomas, Kentucky a month before. His mother and sisters would wash
and iron them, brush his wool coat and hunting cap, wrap his scruffy old
brogans in newspaper, and store them away for him in the locker at the foot of
the bed at home he shared with his sixteen-year-old brother, Bussy. Bob was
anxious to see his frail brother, ill with a serious bronchial condition he had
developed at the age of ten.
Although Bob told his family he had borrowed the money, in
truth he had sold the stationery, the towel set, and other Christmas gifts he
had received from his family and girlfriend. In that way he raised the money required
of him by the Army to get a four-day pass. There was also enough to buy a bus ticket
from Ft. Knox to Peebles and back, and he went home for Christmas, surprising
his family.
As his brother, Bussy’s new fighting
rooster, Ranger, named after the Lone Ranger, Bussy’s favorite radio character,
coaxed the sun to rising with his ringing five-note greeting, and the cows
bawled in the field as if in welcome to him, the gravel on the road leading to
his parent’s farm crunched beneath Bob’s boots. At that hour, only his mother
would be up; his father and his many brothers and sisters would still be
sleeping. He adjusted the haversack slung over the shoulder of his new wool
overcoat and bent down to straighten the creases in the immaculate wool
trousers of his spiffy new uniform.
His mother had been right in her latest letter to him: it
was bleak in Southern Ohio. There was an eerie mist hovering over the land, a
fuzzy band of fog like a shimmering boa hugging the neck of the earth. As far
as the eye could reach, dense bare trees, their feet cloaked in the mist,
seemed lonely and unsupported, their jagged and raw heads, unprotected,
piercing the top of the mist. The silver conditions of the morning seemed to
mirror a shift in Bob’s soul. It was an
aloneness he was coming to know all too well, one in which clear colors and
details formerly sharp and contrasting were fading to gray and merging, were
transforming everything often to unrecognizable states. It was a wary feeling
of exposure to a bizarre new life in which not only his surroundings but he was
becoming unfamiliar to himself.
It had been difficult for him to articulate the issues that
were needling him, and part of the problem was directly tied to the
impossibility of finding that voice in the environment where he was being trained
to be a killing machine. Although in the beginning he had spoken with such
bravado about being ready to go to any lengths to protect his country and
family, as well as Dot, the girl he loved, as the reality of the fighting
approached, methods of killing and maiming and destroying that nobody on the
outside of it could possibly anticipate or comprehend, his sense of purpose was
becoming blurred, like that foggy landscape.
Bob had innocently played with the idea that he had a kind
of affinity with the ways and means of war, for as a backcountry boy he was
familiar with the natural cycles of birth and death of the animals on the farm,
surrounding forests, and countryside. He had euthanized sick animals, shot hogs
in the head in preparation for slaughter, and he knew guns, the feel of them in
his hands, their kick against his shoulder, the real damage they did to animate
and inanimate objects alike. Guns had long been a hobby for him, actually. In
his creative mind, he had even begun to design guns. As a matter of fact, in
his spare time at the training camp in Ft. Knox, he had made rudimentary
sketches of a canny little gun he planned to someday fashion out of a Zippo
cigarette lighter.
Hunting had been nearly a daily activity for him since his
adolescence, and he was learning that his experience in that regard gave him a
decided advantage over many of the other boys at Ft. Knox, town and city boys
whose experience with guns extended no further than toy guns, or perhaps B. B.
guns, boys who had never held real guns in their hands, or tracked down living
prey in their sights, and once positioned in the crosshairs, squeezing the trigger
and killing that prey. But that nagging voice inside of him was urging him to
pay attention to the fact that killing an animal was a whole other matter than
bringing a human being to its death. Despite the fact of his believing in the
necessity of the war, for after all Japan had attacked the United States, and
Germany had aggressed against his country as well, his being away from Ft. Knox
for only a few hours now helped him to see that he was wrestling with that very
moral dilemma, the first and most serious moral dilemma of his life.
His was a tender society that
believed in goodwill toward all people. He had been taught that “Thou Shalt Not
Kill” his fellow man and it constituted a basic tenet of his very soul. How
am I going to kill another human being? he worried as he sauntered in his
usual loping fashion toward the farmhouse. He decided to find time to talk to
his favorite preacher, Harley Ward about it before he returned to camp. Perhaps
that man of God could help to lift the mantle of confusion weighing so heavily
on Bob’s soul.
Barely glowing from a moisture-streaked
window in the kitchen of the farmhouse was a sole low light. In the thick mist,
a plume of white smoke billowed delicately, charging the air with the scent of
wood smoke, a scent of home. Sparks in the smoke twinkled like stardust
shooting from the chimney at the top of the peaked roof. As he neared the back
of the farmhouse, he took note of its slick moisture-sodden clapboards. It was
a house weeping from the melting icicles along its eves, weeping like those
damp and lonely trees, weeping like the boggy fields, as if in an act of
complicity, they collectively wept, as if the whole of nature and his home
grieved an inapprehensible and ill-omened fortune lying in wait for him, his family,
his girl, his country, lying in wait like the hidden land mines he would
encounter on the beaches of Southern, Italy in the not too distant future. Shuddering
like a threatened animal in the few minutes that passed, he worked at shaking
off his paranoia as he entered the perpetually unlocked back door that opened
to the kitchen.
At the cook stove, her back to him, his mother stood in the
arc of light from a kerosene lamp, her body noticeably weary as she bent to her
duties of stoking her cook stove with her poker. At the sound of his footfalls that she knew
so well, but dared not believe were real, and visibly shaking with fear that
they would prove to be products of her imagination, she turned to him. Her
empty hand flew to her mouth to stifle her cry, and tears spilled from her
eyes.
The changes in his mother in just a few weeks took Bob’s
breath away. It was as if the changes in him were manifestly reflected in her,
as if by some means of osmosis beyond the natural connection between parent and
child, his experiences and fears and bewilderments also were hers, only
exaggerated and accelerated. She seemed already to have endured what he was
facing; she seemed to have already passed through, and had been permanently altered
by, the ravages of war: the superhuman demands on one’s body and heart and mind
and conscience; the depleted stores of psychological reserves—the lifetime of
recurring night terrors. In her rote movements as she had bent to stoke her
stove, in her turning to him, and in her covering of her quivering mouth, a
rigid choking anxiety afflicted her.
He lowered his bag to the linoleum-clad floor while
concurrently she dropped her poker with a crash. That emptying of their hands
was the prelude to the opening of their arms. As she swayed weakly in his
embrace, Bob’s dilemma was erased from his mind. In that moment, his conscience
split into two expedient parts, and in a reversal of roles, he became her
personal protector. He knew then that to keep his mother safe, he would kill
their enemies, and without hesitation, if not with relish—he would kill with
the automatic precision of the professional soldier he was learning to be, and
as grievous as they might be, he would live with whatever consequences his
choice quickened in him…©
The above is an excerpt from multi-award-winning and Amazon
best-selling author, Linda Lee Greene’s novel of historical fiction titled, GUARDIANS
AND OTHER ANGELS. The novel is available for purchase in eBook and paperback
through Amazon.
Image: GAFFIN FARM IN WINTER, acrylic painting by Linda Lee Greene
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