The Truck Driver at the VFW Breakfast
Todd had a sausage link on the end of his fork, and he was using it to point. He pointed it at my husband the way you would point at a dog that had done something cute.
“Tell them, Mark,” he said. “Go on. Tell everybody what you did over there.”
Mark looked at his plate. Three pancakes, a pat of butter going soft in the middle, two sausage links he had not touched. He did not look up.
“He drove a truck,” Todd said, to the whole table. “That’s it. That’s the war story. My little brother just drove a truck.”
A couple of people laughed, the way people laugh when the loudest man at the table is laughing. Not mean, most of them. Just going along. Somebody’s uncle down at the far end said, “Somebody had to.”
“Sure,” Todd said. “Somebody had to haul the toilet paper.” And he laughed again and finally ate the sausage.
There were twenty of us at that table. Long folding tables pushed end to end, white paper over them, the flag on its pole at the front of the hall where it has stood since before I was born. It was Veterans Day, eight thirty in the morning, and the whole VFW smelled like coffee and griddle grease.
I want you to understand that I did not scream. I did not throw anything. I am a nurse. I have worked the emergency room at our county hospital for twenty-two years, and I have learned that the loudest person in a room is almost never the one who is going to fix anything.
So I smiled at my brother-in-law. And I said, “Thank you, Todd.”
He blinked at me. “For what?”
“For bringing it up,” I said.
Then I picked up the syrup pitcher, the heavy glass one with the metal flip lid that the Auxiliary ladies have been filling since the Carter administration, and I passed it across my husband to the man sitting on his other side.
That man’s name was Ray Kowalski. He had driven two hours down from Green Bay that morning, and my husband had not seen him since a spring day in 2004 on a road north of Baghdad.
Mark had pulled him out of a burning truck.
I should tell you about our town first, and about the breakfast, because if you have never been to one you might not understand what kind of room this was.
We live in central Wisconsin, in a town of about twenty-one hundred people, where the biggest building is the cheese plant and the second biggest is the Catholic church. Our VFW post sits on the highway at the edge of town, a long low building with brown siding and a gravel lot that floods every April.
Every Veterans Day the post puts on a pancake breakfast. Seven to eleven. It is eight dollars a plate, and every dollar goes to the honor guard and to the Christmas boxes the Auxiliary packs for the veterans at the county nursing home.
The Auxiliary ladies run the griddle. There are four of them, and the youngest is sixty-eight. They wear the same red aprons every year, and they will not let a man near the batter, and nobody has ever tried twice.
Lyle Schaefer is our post commander. He is seventy-seven, a Vietnam veteran, a retired dairy farmer with hands like baseball mitts. He walks with a cane now, but he still stands at the door every Veterans Day and shakes every hand that comes in.