Letters - Timbre' Wolf
by Timbre' Wolf
It was July 4th. I had been invited, by my next door neighbor, to sit on his porch with him while the other neighbors blew up their fireworks. Bob was eighty years old and he was a World War II Veteran. He was one of the nicest, and yet most incensed, men I have ever met. He was incensed at the current administration. But, incensed or not, you couldn't ask for a better neighbor.
The neighborhood where Bob and I lived was made up of scrappers - people who did what ever it took to survive. It was poor and run down except for a few houses where the owners were proud second or third generation "Westsiders." Or in the case of Bob, first generation, with several progeny within a stones throw.
I was living next door in a shed behind the house in foreclosure. It took about a year-and-a-half for the courts to take over the property. So I had some time to get to know Bob. As I was suffering from major depression and post traumatic stress disorder it was as good as any place I could get at the time. The cost? Nothing. During the times that someone paid my electric bill life was good. It was less enjoyable without power.
And I have come to understand that someone, like myself, who went through the "cold war" (or WW III as one General aptly put it) is perfectly entitled to PTSD. It's not just bombs blowing up near you that causes undue stress...it's understanding that "the big one" could take out your entire state at any time. This terror was with me every waking moment from childhood into my young adult years.
So there we were, on July 4th, sitting on Bob's front porch. The first firecracker that exploded sent Bob's body into an involuntary spasm. His legs kicked straight out from their place underneath the lawn chair. He had absolutely no control over them. His daughter explained to me that this always happened and that I shouldn't be alarmed. Bob took it all in stride but there was nothing he could do to stop his legs from kicking violently during the explosions.
On later visits Bob would tell me stories about World War II. He ran the boat from ship to shore carrying soldiers and equipment to the deadliest beaches in the world. He did stints in France/Germany and the islands near Japan. Ed Wood, the critically defamed "worst movie director of all time," could well have been one of Bob's passengers. A footnote is that Ed wore women's undergarments under his Marine Corps uniform. Talk about motivation for evading capture! I doubt if Bob knew anything about that.
Bob told me that many of the equipment burdened young men, who he was to deliver to the German controlled beaches, preferred the fate of the sea over the bombardment and shelling of the beaches. They would sooner drown - and they did. To hear Bob tell it - it was a fairly common thing, this suicide swim. I never read that in any history book nor did I see it on any of the WWII documentaries - so full of glory and honor are they.
Bob also told me about an island in the Pacific which was used as a fend-for-yourself asylum for those young men who "lost it" during the war. The ship might pick you up on it's way back to the states - if it survived the war with Japan. That wasn't in my history book either.
Bob told me of a time when he was to deliver supplies to an island near Japan. A typhoon had developed but his orders were to get the materials to the shore - regardless of the weather. Bob performed his duty but the seas were so rough that, after landfall, Bob fought his way all the way to the front of the boat through blinding rain before he realized that none of the cargo made it - there was simply nothing left on board.
If memory serves we lost a couple million boys in WWII. We lost 58,000 in Vietnam. We're sitting at over 2,500 in Iraq right now - and there is no end in sight. I hear the words of Jesus coming out of the mouths of fools, "There will always be wars," they say...and that - in there minds - justifies war itself. I don't think that that is what He meant to do. It was an observation about human nature, not a divined prophecy. I've become convinced that these imbecile's WWJD? bracelets stand for Where Would Jesus Deploy? And with the rapture as their idea of an exit strategy there seems little hope of turning their heads from the notion that war is a given. I am compelled that it is not.
And Bob was compelled by that thought too. He thought that our involvement in Iraq bordered on insanity and that George W. Bush was a dangerous idiot. With the goal of honoring Bob's sacrifice, and as Jesus is my witness and guide, I will do everything in my power to bring about the end of war forever.
Timbre' Wolf
timbrewolf1@gmail.com
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