A voice from the past

We didn't go to the Alden Cemetery every Memorial Day when I was a kid. Most years, we stayed home, grilled hamburgers, went to the lake - a lazy, three-day kickoff to the summer.

I didn't think much about what the flags and cookouts were for until that year we did all pack up and drive north to the tiny Minnesota town where my dad was born.

His father, a World War II vet, got us there early. Standing next to silent grown-ups among the headstones, it was clear this was no time to be a pest. You absorbed the respect and reflected it. You felt somber - a kid's version of somber, maybe - even if you didn't know exactly why.

Like a lot of men of his generation, my grandpa didn't talk much about himself. He certainly didn't complain. He'd enlisted in the Navy out of high school - a landlocked Minnesotan. They sent him to boot camp, then to diesel engine school in Ames. They taught him to drive landing craft and put him on a ship in the Pacific.

When he crossed the equator, that small-town Midwestern kid turned Shellback. But the only time I heard him talk about the war was one Saturday when “PT 109” was playing on cable. Even then, his reminiscences were kid-friendly: trading rusty knives for fruit, making lanterns out of peanut cans, a slice of belt and diesel fuel. Hardly the brutal stuff of war.

But a few weeks after my dad died last fall, after we'd buried him not far from his own father in the Alden Cemetery, I got a package in the mail from my Uncle Rick.

When I played the CD inside, I heard my grandpa's voice for the first time in 15 years. Years before that, when I was still in high school, my uncle had gotten his dad to talk about the Navy, and he'd gotten it on tape.

How could I have forgotten that voice, those familiar phrasings? As I listened, I could see him leaning back, arms crossed in front, absent-mindedly scratching a forearm: “They warned us: ‘Don't fall overboard, 'cause if you do you're just gone - we can't stop.'

“We thought: Yeah, that's a lot of hooey.”

Until a sailor lost his bearing and landed in the water. All they could do was watch him grow smaller, his hollering fainter, as the ship churned forward - farther away from home.

Grandpa's voice is grave: “It really hit home - made the guys realize that this was war.” I listen. And that solemn respect washes over me just like it did that May morning decades ago under Alden Cemetery's trees.

But I get the reason why - I think for the first time, really get it - on this Memorial Day.

Comment: (319) 339-3154; jennifer.hemmingsen@sourcemedia.net

HOW EMBARRASSIN' - A couple readers called to point out a goof I made that made it into Saturday's paper and an earilier version of this post. A sailor becomes a Shellback when he or she crosses the equator, not the international date line as I mistakenly wrote. Thanks for setting me straight!