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Journey of a Dead Man: CDR Abbott, Journal Entry - March 23th 1945

Journey of a Dead Man: An alternate history of the end of World War II.

Previous entries for this 'blog-novel':
Introduction.
March 9th, 1945.
March 11th, 1945.
March 11th, 1945.

Log Entry, Bart Abbott's Personal Journal, March 23th 1945

I managed to secure leave and used it to head over to Elko for a chance to see Mom and the folks back at home in Elko. Elko isn’t San Francisco or New York and the fact is, it’s not some sort of place that you are going to go through on your way to somewhere else. It just happens that my current duty assignment puts me somewhat in the neighborhood, so it would be wrong to be this close and not take an opportunity to get over there if it is at all possible.

I caught a flight up to Wendover last Monday with "Kermit", and some of his crew. We ended up sharing a room at the BOQ as things at the base are a bit tight on space with all the activity we are causing. It wasn’t much a sacrifice for either of us, as I wouldn’t be there for the first week, so it works out well for both Kermit and myself. This place sits out on the edge of Utah’s Great Salt Lake at the base of the mountains that make up the border between Utah and Nevada. Wendover Field sits on top of what was surely a very nice beach a few thousand years ago, but now it’s a big, flat, blindingly white plain; a frozen sea made of salt with the occasional black rocky outcropping acting like its island counterpart to break of the monotony.

Wendover is in the middle of nowhere - literally. For example, to take the train to Elko from there, you need to ride all the way back towards the east to Salt Lake City on highway 40. if you go that distance in the other direction from Elko, you might as well just drive over to Elko on highway 40 in the other direction instead. So that’s what I did, signed a jeep out of the motor pool and filled up a couple of jerry cans with gas and took off. I could’ve had one of the pilots from the 509th hop me over to Elko but quite frankly; I wanted the time to myself, to help get my mind in the right frame before my return.

No matter where you go in the world today, there’s a reminder of the war everywhere you turn, from the gas ration stickers on the window of your car down to the blackout curtains in every building, the war creeps into everything you see and everything you do. But out here in the high desert, you can actually get away from it now and then. It’s a real luxury to just spend a few hours without any reminders of the war. If you stop for a bit, you can almost see the world as it was before it all went so crazy.

I got to Elko in the afternoon and did my best to be inconspicuous, not that it did any good. Not 10 seconds after I pulled the jeep in front of the house did I have half the street waiting there to shake my hand. It was damned embarrassing and not what I wanted at all.

The thing about the ‘folks back home’ is that any serviceman who passes through town is to the local folks the best way of making contact with the war and more importantly, with their men that are far away overseas. You stand at any train station in the US in uniform and people will say something like “ My sons in the Navy, he’s out on the Enterprise, do you know him?” You just smile and try to give them a sense of reality in your response; that there a millions of people in the armed services of the county out in the war somewhere in the world, and just because you both wear the same uniform doesn’t mean they are closer to their family member. Most of the time you take it in stride, but sometimes the folk will say something that makes you feel just awful, like back in New York recently, a lady stopped me and told me her son was in the Navy, and he was out on the USS Houston. When that happens, you just hang your head and say that you’re sorry to hear that, and sorry about her loss, and move on as best you can. That happens every now and then and I hate it when it does. It makes you pull your cap down low over your eyes to avoid contact whenever possible. The folks see the uniform and for just a moment they also see their kid out there in uniform and a part of their mind gets ahead of reality; that while you stand there on the train platform all resplendent in your uniform, you are just reminding them of what it was that they have lost. Their son will never stand on a railway platform; their son will never have that conversation and that unspoken word will remain forever unspoken between them. That lady in New York will never have her son and there’s nothing you can do to change that fact or to comfort them for their loss. You feel bad, but then you realize that with all the uniforms walking around these days, she probably goes through that at least once a week. Next week, it will be some other poor guy, who will be reminded as I am reminded when it happens to me, that while others keep dying in this war, here I sit safe at home doing my part, small that it is. It does make me feel a bit shameful at times, and I just hope that all this work we are doing on the gadget is going to be worth it in the end.

Returning home after having been gone so long is like a combination of Christmas, your birthday and New Years Eve all at once. All you want to do is to relax, but all the folks you went their to see want you out on “front center stage” to put on a show for hours on top of hours telling your travelers tale’s. Everyone talks at once, eats too much and tries to do too much. In the end everyone gets to be disappointed as your return isn’t quite what they expected it to be.

They are disappointed because you haven’t got any news of the war that they don’t have, because frankly you haven’t been in the war that they read about, because that war is always going on somewhere over the next hill, the next river or next continent from where you have been, so there’s a real let down right off the bat. Its worse for me because I’ve spent my war in far off exotic locales like “Washington D.C”. and half a dozen other places I can’t really talk about, but its not France, England or the Pacific or any of those places that fill the newspapers every day. I can’t even really talk about what I do, I just tell them I work for the Navy Ordinance department, and then talk about how big the guns are on the New Jersey or the Missouri and so on. They politely nod like they know what you mean and then find another subject to talk about.

Of course, if you tell them you’ve been to Washington a few times here and there, they all think you had lunch with the President himself and again, are somewhat disappointed when you tell them that all you did was meet with some of the eggheads of the ivy league.

Mom of course doesn’t really care about the stories about what I’ve been doing; she just holds my hand and hangs on every word, happy just to have me back for however long it will be. That’s the thing about moms, you could have actually had lunch with President and been a guest of the first lady herself and no matter how old you are, her first thought will be whether or not you used proper table manners, kept your elbows off the table and ate with your mouth closed. You can be a “captain of industry”, the chief of staff of the army or a dare I say even President of the United States and I guarantee, no matter who you are in life, your mother in completely and totally unimpressed with your accomplishments. That’s not to say that she’s not proud of you, but it is to say that she hold you in a context that other people cant really hold you. She’s seen you at your worst, watched you come up from crawling to walking to running, from washing once a week all the way up to shaving every day and no matter how old you get or what you accomplish in life or what station you achieve, there will always be a part of you that she sees as that little ‘crumb cruncher’ who kept her up late at night with a toothache; that kid who wouldn’t do his homework or ran away to join the circus and got halfway down the street before he realized it was dinner time and that the circus could wait another day.

This is all that I have in common with the great men of the world; that no matter how great our accomplishments in life, the unique reward of a polite pat on our heads from our mothers with the welcome words “that’s nice dear” is probably worth all the medals of all the armies in the world. Whether we are making finger painting at the kitchen table or liberating the people of France from tyranny, a kind word from you Mom, promptly followed by a polite suggestion to not eat with your elbows on the table is likely to be our most valued reward. The world may hate you or love you, it might think you are terrific person, or a horrible evil little creature, but to your mom, you are always her little boy and if you think about it, that’s not so bad.

As the day wore on, she managed to shoo off the neighbors and we finally got to sit on the together on the porch and enjoy some quiet time together catching up on events. Who was marrying who, and the various movements of the boys I had grown up with in Elko. We listened to the radio and caught up on the war news. She pointed out that President Roosevelt hasn’t been on the radio much as of late, since his return from the conference with the Russians at Yalta, and Vice President Wallace has been making more of an appearance than he has at any time before. She’s not a big fan of the Vice President but keeps her opinions of the man to herself “for the duration”. Occasionally, they still leak out.

She also said that my friend and our neighbor "Beanie" Alonzo had made it home from the war, but that he wasn’t the same as he was when he left. She asked me to be sure to stop by and say hello when I get a chance to him and his mother. She said that she can hear him wake up screaming at night. She worries about the effect of this on his mother. They have both been friends forever, having raised their families next door to each other and having moved through widowhood together and the shared dread of having their sons away at war.

Many of the kids I grew up with have gone to war and some like Beanie have come back, and there are some who wont ever come back. I used to think that dying in war was the worst thing, but as time goes on, I realize that there is more than one way to die and not all men die on the battlefield. Some men come home from the war, but the war comes home with them and they die a little every day until in the end all that is left is a shell of the man who once left home and went off to war.

Its funny how people live in your memories, back in the “eye of your mind”. Of all the experiences you have with a person, your mind picks one snapshot of time for you to hold on to as an image of that person above all others. In my mind, I can see Beanie when he was about 15 years old, standing on the porch one fall in his football uniform with his leather helmet and covered from head to toe in mud and tossing the football from hand to hand, chewing gum and just smiling loudly from ear to ear. He had been playing with a few of the fellahs from school and they needed to get few more of us guys into the game to make it a real show, so he came down the street to get me. It was a grand game, and became an annual tradition from then on. Every year after Thanksgiving, we would have “The Mud Bowl” and the game would quickly go from American Football to English Rugby before the 4th quarter.

Now that kid who only lives in the back of my mind is in reality a war veteran, just back from the battlefields of France, out of the war with an honorable discharge with a wound on both his body and his soul. Where there was once a young man of promise, now stands a broken man in body and spirit, but in my mind Beanie is still standing there with his football under his arm and his gum in his cheeks. The reality of person of Beanie, is now very different from the memory Beanie that I hold.

On Monday morning, I went out for a walk; down the street to the market to get a few things for mom was the excuse, but it was really just a chance to get outside for some solitude. I was halfway down the street when Beanie came out to greet me. I didn’t recognize him at first. His hand went up instinctively for a salute and I waved him down before he met his forehead and shook his hand and smiled. He’s not in uniform anymore, and I’m not much for the whole formal military honors thing when I’m in my home town. At home, we are just “Beanie and Bart” not Navy Commander Abbott and Army Private Alonzo. By my way of thinking, Beanie outranks me. He’s seen the war; he’s been in combat. While other men like Beanie have been out fighting the war, people like me have been at home at risk of nothing but the occasional shortage or cold shower or case of food poisoning.

Beanie walks with a cane now as he’s left a part of his left foot back in France. Where there were once a set of kid-brown eyes, are a now a couple of dark sunken pits that have seen too much for a 22 year old to see. The smile and the gum cracking is nowhere to be found, replaced instead with a nervous tick and a wandering glance. You would never know from looking at him that a few years ago this man with a limp and a cane was just another kid at Elko High School, playing varsity fullback.

As we walked down the street, the street where we both grew up and went to school, his eyes now darted about and it almost seemed like he was on the look out for unseen German snipers. It’s clear from the moment you meet him now that there is a part of Beanie that’s still in France.

I hadn’t seen Beanie since before the war started, so we caught up on the elements of our shared history. Unfortunately, catching up quickly turned into a list of the kids we knew from school and their various fates and of course, the ones that aren’t coming home. There were more than I knew and after a bit I had wished that I didn’t know.

I asked him of his plans now that he’s out of the war, and he said as soon as hes better, he’s going to work on his uncle’s ranch out on border with Oregon. Its open country out there, its a place where a man can really put the war behind him, you couldn’t ask for a better place for Beanie to heal. I sure hope so, for Beanies sake.

When we walked back home from the market, we barely said a word to each other, each of us reaching deep to find that part of us that used to walk down that street carrying our cleats home from school and now not finding more than a shadow of what once was between us. We had taken our youth for granted, and now there was no getting it back, too much time had passed; history had ground down the bedrock of our shared experience. Too many horrors had been seen to leave much space for the memories of our shared past. Where there had once been two kids living and reliving a post Thanksgiving football game, was now replaced by two men in the grips of middle age and one of them struggling with the memory and the horror of war.

The walk to the market and back had left Beanie quite winded and he began to falter as we got closer to our homes. Beanies mom was waiting at the gate, and she guided him through to the house, concerned for the fatigue that could clearly be seen on his face. Beanie just looked over his shoulder at me, gave a small smile and half salute and went inside. His mom and I talked for a minute there at the gate, polite small talk mostly and told me how happy she was that I came home for a visit, but as she walked away she stopped for a second and said

“ ...You know, he always looked up to you”.

Then she quickly went inside, half hiding a cry in her hand.

It ripped my heart out. I don’t think that was her intent but I think she felt that she needed to say it, to help bleed that wound that she had suffered right along with Beanie. In some way, she blamed me for the loss of her boy, for that the change that she saw in her beloved child; that all of this was somehow started by a chain of events instigated by me going to the Naval Academy and not by that paperhanger in Berlin or the Emperor of Japan. I was the older of the kids on the street. I was two years ahead of Beanie. I was the first to go away and join the service before the war; a decision that was met at the time with disdain by Mrs. Alonzo and a few of the other Elko townsfolk. Mrs. Alonzo was an isolationist before the war, back when we could all afford such luxuries in our thinking.

As her words hung darkly in the air, I stood there stunned for a second, at the same garden gate where as a very young child I had once stood and asked Mrs. Alonzo if Beanie could come out and play and I felt truly sorry for her, for Beanie and felt for myself all at the same time. She wasn’t looking for an answer from me to what she had said, which is a shame because she will never know how much had always I looked up to Beanie, and how much I looked up to him now more than ever. My war, my contribution would never measure in value next to his. None of that would matter to the ears of a mother who has lost her son, which is why I’m glad I didn’t say it. It would only have made things worse if I had.

Most of all, I simply wanted my friend back, and back as the wisecracking kid he once was. I knew now that aside from the memory of what he once was, I would never have him that way again and the truth of it is that neither would she. The childhood games we played would now and forever go unplayed, the gate would remain unanswered and the mail would remain unsent. The intentions of what we meant to do with our lives were now meaningless.

Afterwards, I just sat on the porch of mom’s house for a few minutes, to collect my thoughts. I came to back to Elko to come home, to somehow get out of the choking, smothering, olive drab sameness of the war, but the home I came to see and the life I used to live in it, didn’t really exist anymore. No bombs had fallen on Elko, no armies had marched through this part of the world, but the war and the splash of its acidic horrors had spread its corrosion on the people here just as it had the people everywhere else in the world.

That memory of my friend Beanie, back before the war standing there on the porch in his mud covered football uniform was now supplanted by new sight of Mrs. Alonzo walking into her house, with the Blue Star on the front window of their home. What was also now a part of me and my thoughts of home was the sight of so many Gold Stars in Elko and the understanding of their true meaning.

Beanie has paid for his Blue Star, but I’m not too sure I’ve paid for the one sits in my mothers front window. That thought has been bothering me much more than I had realized. In an odd way, I feel like a fraud and that I’ve gamed the system for my own benefit.

I came home to get away from the war, but the war is closer to me now than it has ever been. The war isnt at the distant island of Iwo Jima or the beaches of France anymore, the war lives next door at Mrs. Alonzos house.

Posted @ March 23, 2008 03:55 PM | Blog-novel

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