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Memorial Day

Robert Rothman

You returned after three years with war’s bounty:
shreds of shrapnel in your left leg; two German
Lugers and a Walther P38; a handful of medals

for service; false teeth, upper and lower; and
sleep terrors that echoed for years. In the
photographs of you and friends, barely men

in their twenties, caps askew, dumb smiles,
arms draped over shoulders, frolicking as if in
a college fraternity, the sound of rumbling tanks

and exploding bombs, shrieks and wailing, is
expunged. There are no pictures of battlefields
wiped clean of anything alive. No one has lost

an arm or leg or an eye. No one is exhausted or
weeping. There are no gurneys, hospital tents,
or scalpels. The photographs of the towns and

surroundings are quaint and pastoral. The war
album is a young man’s first trip to Europe
with his buddies; not a journey to mankind’s

lower depths. PTSD wasn’t yet a diagnosis
for what war did to humans, the emotional
and psychic carnage the animal couldn’t

integrate without cracking. You bore it as
my friends’ fathers bore it: in silence; in
repression; in solitary confinement; in screams

that tore from throat under cover of night; in
shame for this pain. You weren’t a jokester
by temperament, a man with fifty gags and

tales up his sleeve, sleight-of-hand pranks,
puns and word games. It was a learned
skill, an art of protection. You were without

knowing it the too-knowing fool of Renaissance
plays, whose stray word shatters the humdrum
before it coalesces again, a clown made by

circumstances, the deep forehead lines and stretched-
out grin the paint of the circus you inhabited. Today,
there will be a moment of silence in baseball

parks, at basketball arenas, in hockey rinks.
Today, many businesses will close, and others
will offer “sales.” Across the country, without

fanfare, the families of the fallen will go to
cemeteries and place flowers on the tombs
of their fathers, sons, husbands, brothers, and

nephews. You didn’t give your life on the battlefield.
You survived, fractured and splintered, and never
were whole again. The horrors and terrors of that war

didn’t end for you. I mark this day by remembering
and recollecting you and the life you made, the love
you were able to give, and your profound gentleness.

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