Battleground

It showed the War was as my father said: boredom flanked by terror, a matter of keeping low and not freezing. “You wore your helmet square,” he said, not “at some stupid angle, like that draft-dodger Wayne,” who died so photogenically in The Sands of Iwa Jima. Those nights I heard shouts from the dark of my parents’ room, he was back down in his foxhole, barking orders, taking fire that followed him from France and Germany, then slipped into the house, where it hunkered in the rafters and thrived on ambush. We kept our helmets on, my mother and I, but there was no cover, and our helmets always tilted. He’d lump us with the ones he called “JohnDoes,” lazy, stupid, useless. We needed to straighten up and fly right, pick it up, chop chop, not get “nervous in the service.” We’d duck down like GIs where German snipers might be crouched in haylofts, their breaths held for the clean shot. “Bang,” my father said, “the dead went down, some like dying swans, some like puppets with their strings cut.” I wanted to hear more, but he’d change the subject, talk about the pennant, the Cards’ shaky odds, how Musial was worth the whole JohnDoe lot of them.