A Memorial to One Man’s Strength, and His Gift of Grace…

The second article in the Grace series – a Memorial Day tribute to my grandfather, and the memory of his legacy in my life

Memories are a curious thing – it is strange that we can never seem to consciously recall something we might once have considered important at the time we should really need it, and yet, these things come unbidden to our mind unconsciously with little or no provocation at all. On a day such as this, the day our nation honors the sacrifices made on our behalf by our armed forces, the enormity of the extraordinary performed by the ordinary is much more than one can comprehend. Thousands upon thousands of the average, millions of “us” have risen up against imminent dangers to safeguard not only our lives, but even the lives of those who are not counted as “us”. This collective effort surpasses any advance in science, any artistic endeavor, any progress we create for our benefit, for their efforts were paid in their blood and there are no words to describe the comprehensive debt we owe to these heroes, men and women just like you and I who found the courage to stand and fight in our stead.

Considering these massed heroes in a single day is right and commendable, but it is so vast as to be nearly incomprehensible – how can we truly value and understand the meaning and importance of this day? How can one who has never experienced the horror of total war understand the real cost that a soldier has paid? Perhaps one way is to consider the experience of a single soldier, to hear the stories of a veteran, one who has gone into the fire and returned – if the tale can be told. There are things that no one wishes to remember at all, and this fact should be chief among our own memories – perhaps this of all things should best teach us caution when faced with a grave threat. But if the stories will be told, then it is our duty to hear them out, to learn what it means to be a soldier.

My grandfather served our country in World War II. He was an electrical engineer in the Navy, specializing in telephony systems, and in October, 1941, he was assigned to the USS Enterprise, one of several aircraft carriers in the Pacific Ocean. By the end of November, the Enterprise was on a war stance, and on December 7, she was 150 miles out of Pearl Harbor when the empire of Japan attacked Ford Island Naval Air Station and other facilities nearby. The crew of the Enterprise were among the first to respond to the attack, and for the next year, the ship would be at the vanguard of the Pacific naval front, providing air cover for Marine landings, attacking enemy fleets, and defending the US fleets from enemy attack. The first year was a year of desperate defense, as one by one, the Japanese naval pilots destroyed each of the US carriers, until on October 26, the Enterprise remained the sole US carrier operating in the Pacific. My grandfather told me of a banner on the hangar deck hung up at this critical time – “Enterprise vs. Japan”.

My grandfather spent much of this first year in his usual support role, maintaining the communication lines and electrical systems of the carrier. However, in times of intense battle, every man in the crew was called upon to do whatever was necessary to ensure the survival of the ship and her men. My grandfather recalled for me the times he worked for hours fighting fires within the bowels of the ship – the Enterprise was struck by six bombs in this first year of the war. 300 men died from these attacks, some of them men he worked with. He told me of the time he stuck his head out a porthole of the main mast to shout an order – just as one of those six bombs struck the ship. His face was turned away from the blast, and he was shielded from the explosion by being inside the structure, but his hair was singed off the top of his head – an instance he once called “a close shave”, the only joke I ever heard him tell about the war.

His war was anything but a joke – the Enterprise fought on despite long odds and the loss of the other carriers throughout the year. When the Lexington was attacked during the battle of the Coral Sea, she was struck by two torpedoes that did massive damage to the ship, causing a large fire, dooming many crew members trapped beneath the fire below decks. My grandfather volunteered for search and rescue duty and was transferred over to the stricken Lexington to assist.

There is a hole in my story here – one that I am not eager to have filled in. For it is this single experience that my grandfather would never speak of, the few hours he spent aboard the Lexington. He never spoke of it to anyone, including my grandmother – she would only say that he would sometimes awaken at night, trembling from the nightmares that would haunt him the rest of his life. Memories can be cruel, unbidden in the night…

As the war progressed, and the US began to get an upper hand in the Pacific, my grandfather’s tour of duty became more and more routine. There were many difficult battles, many other lives were lost, and he witnessed each and every attack made against the Enterprise throughout the entire war, with the exception of those in the carrier’s final month at sea. He left the ship in April of 1945, a few weeks before a kamikaze attack slammed into the forward elevator of the Enterprise, sending it 400 feet skyward, killing 12 men and wounding 72 others – it is quite possible that my grandfather’s routine would have placed him among these men had he been there that day. The memory of these lost lives returned to him often…

After the war, my grandfather’s expertise was needed to help the Armed Forces assess the damage to the Japanese infrastructure, and late in 1945, he spent some time in Hiroshima surveying the damage and helping to draw up reconstruction plans. He returned to the US soon after, but a small dose of radiation from the site returned with him, and slowly began its lethal work within his body.

He found a job with Pacific Bell in San Francisco, and would enjoy a long career with the communications giant, installing massive switching systems deep within some of the cities largest buildings, and helping to modernize the system as computer control was introduced in the late sixties. But as he neared retirement, physical memory of the war began to manifest itself within his body – the radiation was slowly eating away at his cells, a man-made cancer and muscular dystrophy. The radiation damage took nearly twenty years to manifest, and then took another twenty to finish its work.

And so I found myself at his bedside at home, listening to him describe with pride his accomplishment at becoming an Eagle Scout, his boyhood memories of a more innocent time when the outdoors were a boy’s great adventure. I heard him tell the stories of pilots barely clearing the flight deck in choppy seas, and of those who didn’t make it back from a sortie against the enemy. I heard tales of men who bonded quickly, out of necessity to maintain sanity when the odds of success seemed impossible. I discovered the desperate longing for even the chance to go home, to be away from the darkened pit below decks after an attack, and I could infer the instinctive need to be away from the smoke and the screams and the smells of the dead and dying. I found a connection to the events I only knew as history, but now made real as his story…

Until the evening I made my way to his bedside, this time in a hospital. The radiation had left a frail shell of this man, once tall and strong, now holding on against time to be able to see all of his children and grandchildren.

The morphine control gripped tightly in his hand, given over hours before by the nurses –

The yellow pall of papery skin, a scent of decay and death clouding around him –

Eyes sunken and nearly lifeless, a fragile misting of breath fogging the oxygen mask over his mouth –

Somewhere inside, the man, the war hero, fought on, his battle not yet over –

As word came that my brother had finally arrived, we all knew that time would be short. Each one of us took a few minutes alone with my grandfather. I crept in silently and found him asleep, but as I came up beside him, he stirred and looked at me. He asked how soon my brother would arrive – only a few more minutes, I told him. He smiled, then grimaced in pain. He laboriously moved his hand to be next to mine, and I took his hand gently. He gripped my fingers as hard as his strength would allow, and I leaned in closer to hear him whisper “I never heard you sing…”

Grace is doing the right thing even when you don’t know you’ve done it…

I sang the first song that came into my mind, an old hymn and an old friend…

When peace like a river attendeth my way
when sorrows like sea billows roll
whatever my lot, Thou has taught me to say,
“it is well, it is well with my soul”

I continued on with the song as a nurse came to check his stats; she smiled at me as she left, and then I heard my grandfather join me for the final phrase, “it is well, it is well with my soul”. His voice was distant, cracked with effort, atonal and ugly to almost any ear, but not mine. In my entire life, I sang only these nine words in unison with my grandfather, and all of the choral anthems I have ever sung in the mightiest cathedrals of Europe can never compare to the memory of the fleeting sound of my grandfather’s voice joined with mine.

Memory comes when it wants to – this snippet of time, these few seconds of sound rise up into my mind every so often, and I cannot help but smile. His passing was one of the most memorable moments I have ever experienced; seeing him hang on to life, fighting against his body and the poison he had taken in a war fought fifty years earlier – this is a memory I can never and would never erase from my mind. His strength in the face of the inevitable was ingrained into my memory, and it would surface again in my greatest time of need only a few years later. The legacy of his heroism and endurance was a gift of grace that he could impart to me from beyond the grave when I most needed it, and it continues to sustain me to this day.

Today, I consciously choose to honor all of those who have given so much so that we would not have to, though I cannot begin to fathom the depths of the debt I should owe these faceless millions. The debt I owe my grandfather cannot be repayed either, but his is the single memory I can honor on this Memorial Day and know that I truly do understand what this day means.

———-

My grandmother asked me to sing at his memorial service. The nurse who had witnessed our song had told her about it, though she did not recall the song we sang. Curious about what we had shared, my grandmother asked me for the title of the song, and as I told her, she sat and began to weep. After a moment, she told me why, “that was his favorite hymn…” And so, I sang that song to his memory at his memorial service, just as we had sung it together, unaccompanied and raw, and as I reached the chorus, those gathered together in that small church raised their own voices to echo mine. Another memory to cherish, another moment of grace to hold onto…

it is well…it is well
with my soul…with my soul
it is well, it is well with my soul