Porch Money

He sat in a wheelchair, slowly eating dinner. The meal wasn't fancy, just chicken and mash potatoes with gravy and a side dish of corn. With one hand in his lap he quietly ate while his son-in-law and I engaged the dinner time conversation of two people have who just met—where are you from and what do you do. Tom and his father-in-law, William, were from Tennessee. We talked about UT football.

Not until the peach cobbler and ice cream was finished and the waitress had collected the dishes that William began to speak, in a voice that barely carried over the other conversations in the busy restaurant. I was glued to every word.

“My lieutenant asked me how much wire I had laid out. I told him about seven miles. He wanted me to go back in the jeep. So me and a couple other guys…we did. The previous night the Germans had been shelling our positions. We took some hits. That night the shelling started again. Came in close and we took cover as soon as it started. I bailed out of the jeep. Landed in the snow and just laid there waiting for it to stop. It was cold, but I could feel my arm. It was warm. Hot. I didn’t know why. There I was in the snow and my arm was hot. I got up and saw it had been torn to pieces.

"The guy I was with wasn’t much help. He was running around not knowing what to do. But they had trained us so I knew I needed to apply pressure here." The hand that I assumed had been politely sitting in his lap came to the table, except it was hard plastic and metal. He pointed to a place between his wrist and elbow.

“I kept the pressure on my arm and stumbled back to the road. Another vehicle came by and took me to the aide station. From there I was evacuated to Paris to a hospital with fifty other wounded. There was only one nurse and two girls to take care of us. Everyone was in pretty ad shape. One guy was blind. The nurse asked me and this other guy to help feed him. We did."

William described the amputation. “They cut it off and did something with it”. He flicked his right hand as if he tossed away his own hand and wrist. This seemed like an odd thing to say, "did something with it." What else would they have done with it? Put it into the soup, maybe?

I asked him if he was scared. As casually as if I had asked him if he wanted some more peach cobbler and ice cream he said yes. Six months later with his new prosthesis and some training where he learned to tie his shoes he was discharged with 300 dollars of porch money. "That's what we called it. Go home and sit on the porch in a rocking chair."

Except William came home, went to work for the Veterans Administration and like so many others of his generation left behind the Battle for Bastonge.

I spent my weekend listening to stories of young men who saved my country and the world from tyrants and their tyranny. Young men who parachuted out of burning planes only to be captured by the Germans, young men who shot planes out of the sky, who trudged through snow and darkness to find buddies bloodied and killed. Young men who shot up outhouses. Young men saw friends disappear, held dying comrades. Young men who were on ships headed for Japan, knowing that a landing there was nothing but a suicide mission. Young men who were asked to draw fire so that others could take cover. Young men who got up every day to take an island and once done, went off to take the next leaving 90 percent of their buddies on the beaches. Young men who once it was all said and done came home and quietly went back to their homes, their farms, their families, their jobs to resume a life that could not have ever been the same, but somehow they pretended it could be.

Stoic heroes. Men who served in World War II and never asked for a memorial.