Veteran In my youth I existed in a dichotomy. My earlier years were in a city far away from the country I reside in now. I was American in name only having an absentee father from the hills of Appalachia who fought in Asian wars and stood guard in a German outpost. My mother being German and having fallen for a man who served in that outpost. Honky Tonk blues would fill our German household when he arrived, and when staying with my Oma (Grandmother) it would be classical baroque music such as Wagner. I did not know the difference, I simply called it music and enjoyed both (as I still do). The city of Berlin, which is the place of my birth, holds a special place in my heart. Its vibrance and the embrace of its people to a future are remarkable. I love walking its streets, and nearby villages with ancient walls and homes dating to the Renaissance. A sense of history that makes the young United States seem like a teen at a high school dance (granted a well armed teen that tries to do the right thing). Cobble stone streets and clock towers in the forest along with cloisters and modern malls. One is imbued with a sense of the historic and jarring modern there that escapes many who live here in sunny southern California where history is basically the Dodgers stats with barely a nod to Brooklyn where they started and acquired their name (Trolly Dodgers). Berlin recently celebrated its 750th birthday, that adds some context given that it exceeds the US years by a factor of three. But for me, perhaps of even greater potency and reflection is that chaotic cauldron called the USA. Immigration, or rather the argument, is a more recent phenomenon in the many older nations of the old world, but here in the USA, it remains as old as our nation (Ben Franklin complained about the over representation of German peoples) and is an integral part of who we are. We have always embraced and been disturbed by our new neighbors, their crazy music (African slaves brought us the banjo), and to borrow a metaphor from Berlin, at one time the center of calliopes, a cacophony of languages and foods and ideas brought to disturb the placid waters of our neighborhoods. They came, all of them, sometimes as a trickle, sometimes in waves. My friend Henry, his family left Spain in the 1870s during the upheavals of the Glorious Revolution, they traveled to many countries, most to Brazil, some to other parts of South America and a few to Cuba. Henrys parents fled Cuba and came to America. Ricky Ricardo used to buy musical instruments from his fathers shops in Havanna. That family now stretches from the Jersey shore to the California Coast, and if they are like Henry, musical prodigies who also know how to run a firm. My own Kisers can be traced back to the French and Indian Wars and pretty much every war in between then and now. The influx of fresh ideas springs from who we were, combined to who we become. It is perhaps the greatest and most powerful secret of America, the integration of peoples. Which of course brings me to focus on a smaller area. An area that has produced more than its fair share of people who are willing to die for our nation. It green hills, the Trail of the Lonesome Pine, its stories, and its tragedies still whisper to me, even as I fight the California traffic for another meeting, or look distantly at the snows blanketing far off mountains when the smog clears up. Its people have often been forgotten, sometimes remembered, but always there. Southwest Virginia, Eastern Kentucky/Tennessee are often remarked to with disdain as the coal fields. And what they do have, when you enter those mines and see the white dust on the walls, and smell that all too familiar smell that miners know better than most, is heart. The overlooked heart that gives fire of our industrial age, a heart that for so long ensured (and continues to ensure) that the lights stay on, the computers purr, and the microwave cooks. It is what keeps the Tesla auto moving (the effete snobs at the local dealership get upset when I call them coal cars). That area is a contrast. The men leave the beautiful streams and the greenest of rainforests to enter the darkness like Tolkein dwarves to bring out the riches for the world. They prefer not to. You speak to most of my family and they will tell you they prefer a day of deer hunting (which in my youth was considered an excused absence from high school), a day of fishing or even a day of walking in the forests which are ubiquitous in the region. It is these men and women I think of today. They have no desire to leave their green hills, even with the hardship in their lives, they love where they are. It is as deep as the hollows and as inexplicable as foxfire. It dwells in their souls like a hidden lover. The heart of the people love the streams, the hot and humid summer days where the community pool was their gathering spot, or some lonely picnic table on a roadside by White Top, worn, the paint and varnish long since weathered off, and only feet from the laurel bushes and stream where deer, wild turkeys and adventure hide waiting for the next young man to enter. No, they dont want to leave, their dream is their idyll. And yet I look at my fathers portrait, he loved the area, so much so he only felt at home there and nowhere else. His fondest memories are of the Virginia Creeper trail, a coal route changed from iron cars that carried power to iron men who walked. Lie so many lovers who did not return the feeling, the hills can be beautiful but hard. My fathers story illustrates that. At 15 he needed to leave and lying about his age joined the military. For twenty years he let flow his sweat, the heartbeats of his life, and sometimes his blood, risking all for a nation that at times tossed him into the breach as a cheaply as we do expendable printer cartridges today. His is a loyal and royal legacy. His grandfather was a machine gunner in another war, and of course generations before fought and died for causes and country often forgotten in tombstones lost in the thick forests of these hills. I would like to say that my father is unique, but he isnt. So many he grew up with left and fought, and came back, and left again, and came back. It is said that even Ulysses felt the call of sirens long after his ship had passed the islands of shipwrecks. These men and women too hear it all their lives. It is bitter in some ways, pressing its hurt into their memories, but there is also the most profound sweetness. A beekeepers first harvest of the hives in early summer that sits longingly on the tongue. Yes, it can be like that. I am sometimes conflicted when writing about my father, he wasnt the most understanding of men. I was the son he could not understand or mold, I suppose I might be the rebel born of the blood that came from a rebellious region, and unwilling to conform to his world view. When you think on it though, I was perhaps prideful, young and, well, rebellious. My world view did not encompass friends dying and retreating in Korea, blood spilt in the jungles and rivers of Vietnam. His view saw that world, saw it at its worst as he fought in the muddiest and dirtiest places against a people who often cared less about life than he did. He prevailed, that is to say he lived to come home. The forge of those times, like our own forges today, hardened him, and inured him to hardship. He took his pleasures where he could find them, perhaps he might have been too grasping at times, but then he was a prime witness to the shortness of life as those around him fell away, in the mines during his youth, in the mountains and valleys of Korea, the jungles of Vietnam, and the black lung clinics in the Clinch Mountains. Hes found his rest though. The poplar are there, the squirrel nests sit out starkly on autumn branches, and the deer in the spring come to chew on the grass. The wind flows over him, sometimes cold and bitter, sometimes heavy with the smell of honeysuckle, and they blow his troubles away so that his body can rest. It is where he was happiest, and it was from where he tried so hard to leave in his youth. His headstone doesnt carry much beyond his name, his birth and the day he departed. The granite hardness is silent to his time serving his nation. If you look around you will see many granite headstones like his. Many witnesses testifying mutely to lives of sacrifice, to lives that fought and died for a nation that is also the very definition of freedom. They are vets, they are vets from this small corner of the world called the Appalachians. They loved their families, their traditions, and after all is said and done, the granite that tells no story beyond the date they drew breath and the date that breath left them, that granite silently guards over those who loved this nation.
Posted on: Wed, 12 Nov 2014 00:46:55 +0000
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