So many years since I last talked with Mr. Peanuts. He was having a hard time remembering Those Days that day, had difficulty remembering what he’d wanted to tell me, exactly.
Now his time has passed, but the role he had in history has not. Never will.
He enlisted in the Marines in the summer of 1942. During the next three years, the Louisiana corporal from B Company, 3rd Tank Battalion, 3rd Marine Division, spent time training in San Diego, guarding prisoners in Hawaii, and then drawing what might be called slightly more demanding duty in Bougainville and Guam.
On Iwo Jima, one of the tanks in his division ran over a 500-pound bomb the Japanese had buried as a land mine. The explosion threw one of the tank crew up against the closed tank’s hatch with such force that the soldier was killed. Crushed skull.
It was in this atmosphere that Mr. Peanuts celebrated his 22nd birthday.
In his twilight, Mr. Peanuts found memories of World War II and memories of each passing week equally fuzzy. But on one of his clearer days toward the end, he had the pleasure of accepting a brick, inscribed in his honor and placed in Chennault Aviation & Military Museum of Louisiana’s Memorial Plaza, a gift from his 6-year-old great grandson. The boy worked a front yard lemonade stand to raise the $100 needed to honor his favorite military hero.
Veterans Day is for guys like Mr. Peanuts.
When Jimmy Page was a high school senior, he’d buy me milk shakes and fries at the Dairy Maid in our hometown. But when he graduated, he couldn’t do that anymore because his country sent him halfway around the world. We couldn’t get but two channels on our television set, much less get a text or phone call or milk shake from Jimmy Page. Not in Southeast Asia. Not in 1968. He might as well have been in another world. Which, for all practical purposes, he was.
He came home, and in one piece. But his helicopter had crashed and he’d broken both of his hands while flying it and a lot of his friends, he saw die. You don’t just shake something like that off. Your hands might heal in a few months, but that was the easy part.
Veterans Day is for guys like my old hometown hero Jimmy Page.
In the mid-1990s, a little boy in Shreveport’s Broadmoor area would sit underneath the deck in my back yard. He and my son, in plastic Tiny Tyke chairs, would plan what they would break next.
There was a ball to kick or a dog to chase. A tree to climb. But my little neighbor Jake outgrew all that. He graduated to repairing trucks in his driveway, to finishing high school, and to enlisting in the Army.
It’s an odd experience to watch a boy or girl grow from a child to a full-fledged protector or America, and on foreign soil too. You don’t know where they are or what they’re doing. You just know they aren’t in the safety of your backyard anymore. About the only thing I could do to support Jake while he was in the Middle East was mow his parents’ grass, the same grass I’d seen him mow and grow up in.
Veterans Day is for guys like my neighbor Jake. He’s your neighbor too.
Contact Teddy at teddy@latech.edu