November 11th, Feast of St. Martin of Tours, Patron of Soldiers
Annie went to work as usual on Veterans’ Day. It was a federal holiday, so Isabel was off from school. She and Martin went to seven o’clock mass in the morning to pray for the dead and the maimed, then came home. She had an unhurried “weekend” breakfast of bacon and eggs and biscuits and fried potatoes – half the time she made do with cereal on school days. Martin did his usual chores. He fed the animals. He spread chicken-generated fertilizer mixed with cow-generated fertilizer, lime, broad-leaf weed eradicator, crabgrass killer, and mulch on the lawn in front of the house. Isabel held the ladder and the dogs supervised while he replaced the rotted gutters on the veranda. After lunch he pulled bad wood from the veranda floor and replaced it with new wood. He tried to sing with Isabel as they painted, discovering his voice still wasn’t quite up to more than a few bars at a time. He settled for humming.They were sitting on the top step, playing checkers, enjoying another Indian summer’s day, when Annie got home from work. “This is it?” she asked. “This is your Veterans’ Day celebration?”
“We went to church,” Isabel told her, deftly avoiding the trap Martin had set for her and setting one of her own.
“And we fixed the gutters and the rotted place on the veranda floor,” Martin added, spotting the trap and deciding he didn’t like this game anymore. “That doesn’t count?”
Annie sat down next to Isabel, looking over the checkerboard. “You’re supposed to have parades and speeches,” she pointed out. “What would politicians do without them?”
“I’m a veteran,” Martin said. “Can’t I choose to spend the day with my very best girl?”
“Vets eat free today at The Green Terrace,” she pointed out.
“They do at De Carlo’s, too,” he dismissed, “and the clams are better. I think Collura’s has a deal, too, if you want Italiano.”
“What do you want to do, vet?” she asked.
“Have a parade, I think,” he suggested after a moment’s thought. “We can march from the veranda to the barn and back. Isabel can sing The Stars and Stripes Forever, and I can do the piccolo part – ‘doodly-oot-doot-doo!’ – and you can be the drum majorette.”
“How can I be a drum majorette without a drum?” Annie laughed.
“A drum majorette doesn’t get a drum,” Isabel explained using the same tone Martin sometimes used when he corrected her English. “You need a baton!”
Martin grabbed the straw broom for her. “See?” he asked. “Perfect baton!”
Annie gave it a few experimental twirls after bobbing it up and down and few times. They lined up, Annie in front, Isabel in the middle, and Martin bringing up the rear. “Ready?” he called.
“Ready, sir!” Isabel called, saluting.
“Ready, sir!” Annie echoed.
“Don’t forget to start on your left foot… and… March!”
They started for the barn, Annie raising and lowering her broom. Isabel sang “da-dum-dumty-dum-dumty-dum!” and Martin added the obligatory “doodly-oot-doot-doo!” Annie started giggling and Isabel bumped into her back, losing her step, so they had to start over again. Annie wasn’t quite able to stop giggling, but she did manage to keep step.
“Comp’ny halt!” Martin called as they reached the barn door. “Left face! Left face! Forward, march!”
“Be kind to our big-turbanned friends,” Isabel sang, politically incorrectly.
“For Abdul could be somebody’s brother..”“Doodly-oot-doot-doo!” interjected Martin.
“He lives in a Salafist swamp,“Doodly-oot-doot-doo!”interjected Martin again.
Where the discourse is heated and damp!”
“’Dawmp?’” Annie asked, and started laughing again.
“Now, you may think that this is the end,” continued Isabel,Martin and Isabel laughed along with Annie as they sat back down on the veranda steps. She held her sides, she was laughing so hard. When she was finally able to bring herself back under control she wiped her eyes with the hem of her skirt. “Oh, Martin,” she gasped. “That was… That was…”
“Well it is, but to prove that we're liars,
We're going to sing it again,
Only this time we'll sing higher.”
“Fun?” he suggested.
“Blasphemous, I think,” she sighed. “We’re supposed to be honoring our veterans, and here we are, having a good time!”
“The one,” he suggested, “doesn’t necessarily exclude the other. Most of the guys I’ve ever known who are dead now would be happier marching across the front yard to the barn and back with two pretty girls than they would be being dead. All of them, I think.”
“Shouldn’t we be thinking of them?” Annie asked.
“Isabel and I are. Who are you thinking of?”
“Oh! I did buy these today, now that I remind myself.” She looked in her purse and found the three Buddy Poppies she had bought from a girl at work.
Martin took his, looking at it, twirling it briefly between his fingers – just a cheap plastic flower on a wire stem that actually looked nothing like the poppies he had been familiar with in Helmand. They were a different flower entirely.
“You know the significance of this, sweetheart?” he asked Isabel quietly.
“’In Flanders fields the poppies grow,“A-yep,” he acknowledged. “You know where Flanders is?”
Among the crosses, row on row,’” she recited.
“The Netherlands?” she guessed.
“Belgium. The Dutch-speaking part of it, so you were close. That war was a hundred years ago – 1914 through 1918. There were millions of men involved, using equipment that was primitive in comparison to what we use today. We lost fewer than five thousand men in the Iraq War in eight years, and we haven’t lost quite that many yet in Afghanistan in twice that much time. That would have been a fairly quiet afternoon on the Western Front. The U.S. took five times that many dead in in the Meuse-Argonne Offensive in 1918 – twenty five thousand young men – gone from this life. The Battle of Verdun lasted ten months, and resulted in a third of a million dead for the allies and the same for the Germans. They averaged 70,000 dead young men a month, combined. That’s not counting the maimed, and lots of them were worse off than me. Each and every one of those was a human being, honey. They lived and they breathed. They told jokes, sometimes they were grouchy, they ate breakfast, and they sang. Every one of them had a father and a mother, most of them brothers and sisters, wives, and sweethearts, all of them had family of some sort. They had futures planned. It’s easy to forget that because there were so many of them.”
“Are you sure you want to talk about this, Martin?” Annie asked.
“It’s the whole point of the day, isn’t it?” he asked, his face much more solemn than it had been when they were playing at being a marching band. “The point is to Remember. The guy that wrote the poem was a Canadian physician, Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrae. He wrote it after he presided over the funeral of a friend of his at the Battle of Ypres. He knew the man before the man became a statistic. I know the first two verses by heart, and I should know all three:
In Flanders Fields the poppies grow,
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our places; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard among the guns below.
We are the Dead.“I think,” Annie told him, her own face serious again, “I might understand a part of what you’re talking about.”
Short days ago we lived, felt the dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved,
And now we lie
In Flanders fields.”
“If we learned something from Vietnam,” Martin mused, stroking Isabel’s hair, “it was not to treat the soldiers like garbage. There are still lots of people in the country who’d like to, but they don’t think the rest of the country would let them get away with it anymore. They’re afraid of tar and feathers. Now people say ‘Thank you for your service’ instead of spitting on them or asking how many babies they killed. But telling me ‘thank you for your service’ always makes me feel kind of embarrassed. That probably goes to show that you just can’t please some people. I simply didn’t feel all that heroic at the time. I still don’t feel all that heroic despite having given an eye and large patches of epidermis for my country. We had our jobs to do and we done ‘em, except for the weasels who sold national secrets, or got their sexual jollies by doing degrading things to prisoners, or that moron who ran off and joined the Taliban. I’ve got most of two arms, and all of two legs, and all my mind. I’ve got half my eyesight. I spent time in Landstuhl and Walter Reed, where I got the best care available. I saw guys – and a few girls – who were a lot worse off than I am. I’d occasionally see old fellows from World War II or Korea, more from the Vietnam era, there at Bethesda, and it was like we were all in the same club.”
Annie nodded. “Henry the Fifth.”
“The play’s made a comeback,” he agreed. “Certainly the quote has, at least among us, among vets.”
“We few, we happy few, we band of brothers,” Annie quoted.
“For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile.”
He nodded. “There are lots of guys who can quote those lines who’d have to be dragged kicking and screaming to watch a Shakespeare play. Does ‘em good to get a little High Cult-chuh. You ready to go eat cake?”
“Cake?” Annie asked.
“It’s also my birthday. And my name day.”
“Your ‘Name Day?’”
“Feast of Saint Martin of Tours. He’s also the patron saint of soldiers, so it kind of all fits together like it should, eh?”