The Purple Heart in the School Gym

“Bud, most of Grandpa’s war stories are made up,” my son-in-law said, and he said it with a smile, the way you tell a boy the truth about Santa Claus.

It was the first Sunday in November, and we were at my daughter’s kitchen table in town with a pot roast between us, carrots and potatoes around the edge of the pan the way her mother used to make it.

My grandson, Ethan, is ten. He had asked me, right before that, to tell the one about the mess sergeant and the canned peaches, which is the only war story I have ever told at a dinner table.

I had told it. Ethan laughed in the right place, the way he always does, even though he has heard it maybe twenty times.

Then Greg wiped his mouth with his napkin and leaned toward the boy.

“Grandpas tell stories,” Greg said. “That’s what they do. And that Purple Heart in the drawer at his house, they handed those out to just about everybody over there. It’s not like in the movies.”

My daughter, Michelle, set her fork down. “Greg,” she said, just his name, quietly, the way her mother used to say mine when I was about to say something at church I would regret.

Greg shrugged. “I’m just saying. He should know what’s real and what isn’t. Somebody should have told me when I was his age.”

Ethan looked at me. He had a forkful of potatoes halfway up, and he held it there, and he looked at me with the plainest question a ten-year-old can put on his face without saying a word.

I am seventy-six years old. I was a Specialist Four in a rifle company of the 1st Cavalry Division in 1969.

I carried mail on a rural route in central Wisconsin for thirty-one years after that.

In all that time I had never once raised my voice at a dinner table, and I was not going to start at my daughter’s, in front of my grandson, over a pot roast she had gotten up at seven to start.

“Michelle,” I said, “would you pass the potatoes, please.”

She passed them. Her hand was not quite steady. Greg went back to his plate.

Ethan finally ate his forkful, and nobody said another word about the war for the rest of the meal.

The drive home

I live about eleven miles out, on the county road past the feed mill, in the same white farmhouse my wife and I bought in 1974. She has been gone four years this past August.

I drove home that night with the radio off. The fields were cut down to stubble on both sides of the road, and there was a skin of frost already starting on the ditches.

I want to be honest about what I felt, because I have thought about it a good deal since.

I was not angry, exactly. I was ashamed, and I could not have told you right then what of.

When I got home I went into the back bedroom where my wife kept her sewing desk.

The top drawer on the left side has a cigar box in it, a White Owl box older than my daughter.

Inside it there is my discharge paper folded in thirds, a picture of six boys in front of a Huey helicopter, the yellow and black patch of the 1st Cavalry Division, and the medal.

The Purple Heart is a heavy thing for its size. It has George Washington’s profile in gold on a purple heart, on a purple ribbon with white edges.

I had not taken it out of that box in eleven years.

I sat on the edge of the bed and held it in my palm, and I understood what I was ashamed of.

I had never told Michelle how I got it. Not once. Not her, not her mother, not anybody.

So when Greg said the stories were made up, there was nobody at that table who could have said different.

The only person who knew was me, and I had been passing the potatoes for fifty-seven years.