On the Eurostar south on Saturday we passed - as we do every time - a cemetery somewhere between Lille and Paris. It was a military cemetery, judging from the rows of identical crosses and the Tricolor looming above this small patch of greenery. I could not help but again be moved by its fleeting sight, and to think of the horrors enacted out in the name of narcissistic geo-politics that slaughtered a generation and set the stage for the fascist monstrosities that followed in the 1930s and 1940s (I was guessing that, given its geographic position, it was a World War 1 cemetery). I come from several generations of men who served in the Armed Forces. My maternal grandfather was on bomb disposal duty during World War 1. When I asked him why he volunteered for such treacherous work his response was so New York: “The odds were better’. My paternal grandfather was a Commandant in the US Navy, and during the Second World War he was running a cargo ship dodging German U-Boats in an attempt to keep supplies reaching the UK. And my father signed up with four friends from Brooklyn for the Marine Corps during the weekend after the Pearl Harbor attack. He was the only one to return alive from the nightmare that was Okinawa. It is extraordinary to consider the very fact of your existence to be predicated on the random, the happenstantial. Just as the very fact that my grandfather volunteered for bomb disposal meant he didn’t go over the top and came back to New York alive and met my grandmother - which resulted in the birth of my mother. And given that my father was fast on his feet in his late teens (when he was a Marine) meant he was given the plumb assignment of running between commanding officers during the heat of battle and - as such - also didn’t go over the top. He survived. He returned to New York. He met my mother at his sister’s wedding a few years later. And here I am, many decades later, writing this post - my very life the result of a father and a grandfather who survived the killing fields of world war.
Posted on: Sun, 26 Jan 2014 16:01:05 +0000
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