Today is Memorial Day. Most folks get it confused with Veterans Day, and wave flags, put crap on sale and have picnics. But it’s supposed to be for those who have fallen in war. One such person was my grandfather, Archibald Edwin Curtis. The big difference was that it took the war fifty years to kill him.

My grandfather, in my mind, was a pot bellied old man, gruff but kind. He could be a bear, but cried one time when I came home from school and didn’t say hello to him becuase I’d had a bad day. I keep a picture of him on my nightsand, of me at about five, sound asleep on his lap in a lawn chair at his house. I could spend hours telling you about him, how he was my first real role model as a man, but that isn’t the point of today’s post.

He died in 1983, on an operating table in Norfolk, Virginia. When my father, who’d flown from our home in the Chicago suburbs to be there, called to tell me the news, it was the first time I ever heard my father cry. I was numb for months. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I found out much about my grandfather’s service, a tale both amazing and horrifying.

My grandfather left for the army in 1943. His number got called up, even though he was a father of two, with my uncle Harvey sitting in my grandmother’s tummy. But he did his duty and left. He spent a year over there or so, details are fuzzy. He was wounded there, rescuing a fellow soldier pinned down between two machine gun nests. He received the Bronze Star for the rescue.

There’s a funny tale that I used to think was bullshit until i ran into one of grandpa’s fellow soldiers, who showed me a pic from that time. General Patton used to visit hospitals and give Purple Hearts to the wounded.He tried to give one to my grandfather, who refused. When Patton started in on him, my grandfather pointed to a man across the aisle who’d had both legs blown off by a mine. My grandfather told Patton to give his medal to him, but all the medal he needed was his wife and kids at home. He was that kind of man.

I think that rescue and being in a squad that had to help count the dead at Buchenwald death camp were what killed him. Folks who knew him say he came back a changed man. Grandma certainly felt so. He drifted between jobs, trying to feed three kids. He was a farmer, a policeman, and finally became a contractor and carpenter. I can use Google Earth on his hometown and still see houses he built with his bare hands.

It was while he was doing this that he had his first real mental health issues. He went in for depression, and they used electro convulsive therapy on him. They didn’t have the words for PTSD, but that’s what it was. He’d fight the black dog and mental health issues most of his life. He snapped one day and chased my father aroudn the yard with an ax, believing him to be a German soldier in his half delusional state.

Where it really impacted him was how it caused physicians to regard him. Every time in the late fifties and sixties, if he complained of heart problems or physical ailments, the local doctors would just tell him it was all in his head, and to go back to the VA. On one of those trips, they tried insulin shocking him, and as a result he devolped diabetes.

By the time I came around, he was retired. He spent weeks at a time in hospitals. I remember finding out he was one of the first ten people in America to recieve a triple bypass in open heart surgery. He had a second one, and that was the one he couldn’t survive.

My grandfather was a veteran, who the VA failed in their handling of him. The medical examiner who did his autopsy said he’d suffered at least four strokes and seven undiagnosed heart attacks before he’d gotten treatment. But I respect,love and honor the veterans who serve, they deserve better.

My grndfather never made too big a deal about his service, except to join the American Legion and the VFW. He loved parades, and when I’d spend summers with him, we’d go to at least one every weekend. I still salute folks who are wearing their Legion hats or VFW colors.

But today, while I’m thinking of him, I’ll also be doing my best to honor him. I’ve volunteered at the VA before, and I give to various veterans groups when I can. I’ve seen up close and personal what modern warfaare does to humans.

Much to my father’s annoyance , my biggest way to honor my grandfather is to protest whenever this country goes to war. My family has suffered horribly because of war, and we’ve seen the cost. I respect those who serve, and condemn those who would use them to further political agendas set out by religion and corporations. Right now, we have hawks in office who are looking at Iran like the last piece of chicken in a KFC bucket. We don’t need to go in there, and anyone who says we do, I tell them to send themselves and their kids first.

Gods rest you, Archibald Curtis. I miss you, and I’m also sort of glad you didn’t live to see what’s become of your country and your party. I think you would have hated Trump’s draft dodging guts. I think you would have tried to respect your enemies better. You’d have approached everything with some common sense. You’re gone, but I’d trade a dozen of my days in this world to have one more with you. Goodbye.