The Pacific

My grandpa never talked about his time there. Over the years, little things would sneak out. He felt sorry for the Vietnam vets, because he knew what they'd been up against. He said I'd never had a real fever, even when I was burning up with pneumonia. He really didn't like the rain. He called the Japanese "Japs," always. He hated the Red Cross because they charged them for the cigarettes on the hospital ship, while he supported the Salvation Army because they gave everything away. He could play bugle, trumpet and trombone until the jungle rot took his lip, and his teeth. He'd been wearing a false set since 1944.

I wonder what he would have thought of this series. He'd have watched it, I'm sure, just like he watched "Victory at Sea" every Sunday. But I wonder what kind of toll it would have taken on him. I can't imagine. He would have had nightmares, I think. But to think that he would have remembered what he'd seen...that's silly. Because he never forgot.

Reading "Helmet For My Pillow," and the passage on their fatalism—well, that was just grandpa to me. "When your number's up, it's up. When the Old Man Upstairs decides it's time, that's it." Life and death were not choices. And someone else decided who got which.

When grandpa got sick, N-stage sick, he would lay in his hospice-provided hospital bed in the living room, smoking his Chesterfield Kings (why deny him, for God's sake?), and his pale blue eyes would look off into a distance none of us could reach. And he'd wait for the Old Man to take him. I'd sit with him...he liked it when I sat with him, because I didn't feel the need to make him talk. As if I could possibly distract him from what was coming.

I thought Ep. 2 would hit me hard. After all, his unit was there, the band, it was offhandedly mentioned in a way that only someone like me, someone who was breathlessly wanting that confirmation, would catch. I thought that was the worst. And then the other episodes unfolded, and I knew. For him Guadalcanal was just the beginning of a year of death and sickness and the very flesh rotting off his body until he was sent back a malaria-ridden, 120-pound open wound.


For so many others, it was the end.

He would have liked the show, I'm sure. But he wouldn't have talked about it.