A SOLDIER GOES HOME FOR CHRISTMAS

From 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. An ambitious and thorough exploration of two families whose experiences are funneled through the pivotal early to middle decades of the twentieth century, this seamless blend of fiction and nonfiction renders an authentic slice of Americana at its most personal and profound. Based on actual events and oral history, and featuring transcriptions of dozens of authentic private letters written by the story’s principle characters, Greene delivers an insider’s view of the hearts and minds and day to day events of a singular group of people counted among history’s greatest generation. Powerful in its sweeping journalistic impact and at the same time tender in its novelistic prose, this highly rated book contributes greatly to the preservation efforts of the era it interprets.

 

The novel is available for purchase in eBook and paperback through Amazon.

Purchase Link of the book: http://goo.gl/imUwKO

Image: GAFFIN FARM IN WINTER, acrylic painting by Linda Lee Greene

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