Remembering the Dead

By Murray Polner

I used to commute to work by rail with a neighbor. One day I learned that we were both veterans, me a Korean War draftee and he an officer in the Vietnam War. One of his military jobs was, to say the least, a bit unusual. For a time he was assigned to visit families of the dead to inform them their husband, son, grandson, nephew had been killed in the war.

I was stunned. I wondered how it affected him then and now. Does he still hear their cries? Did he ever try to contact some of them?  I remember turning to him, asking for more, please. “No, I’m sorry I told you, forget it,” he said, not unkindly. But not before he added a final word. He’d never allow his two sons to join the military, never. “Let the non-vets shouting USA USA go. Not my kids.”

I remember others too who died in war. In our earlier “Good War,” Irving Starr, whose family owned the delicatessen in the house adjoining our four-family apartment, was killed during a raid over Romania’s Ploesti oil fields. Buddy, his younger brother, told me that insofar as he knew, Irving’s body was never recovered.

I learned about Phil Drazin’s death while playing punch ball on the street next to his father’s grocery store. When his father received the news I watched in fear as his father ran out of his store on Straus Street and Lott Avenue, crying, yes, crying, and I thought I had never seen a grown man cry in public. “Maybe it’s a mistake, maybe it’s a mistake,” he kept shouting.

I wish I could remember the name or face of the 18 or 19 year old boy whose family had recently moved into an adjoining apartment just before he received his draft notice. I do remember that on one especially humid, hot summer weekday afternoon I watched from our second floor window as his father stumbled toward an apartment bench and began sobbing. My mother, who was standing next to me, was very good about such things. She ran down to the street and embraced the father while he was still wailing. She then gently led this heartbroken stranger whom none of us knew to his equally devastated wife. My mother then returned to our apartment, her eyes wet with tears at what she had just witnessed, and told me she was glad I was still too young to go to war.

My boyhood pal Porky was drafted and never returned from the Korean War. The laconic and pleasant Trinchintella boy, who worked at his family’s neighborhood gas station, was trained as a Vietnam War helicopter gunner. Gravely wounded, he died in a military hospital in Japan, his traumatized parents seated helplessly in an empty corridor, waiting. An uncle told me that the family would never again speak about their son’s death.

I remember an African American former student, Ronald Boston, shy, unathletic, a kid who tried hard to earn good grades and was drafted during Vietnam. Ironically, his mother worked in the nursing home in which my mother, stricken with Alzheimer’s disease, resided and where she tended her. One day she told me about a dream in which Ronald had been killed in Vietnam. Poor Mrs. Boston. Poor Ronald. He never did make it home except in a flag-covered casket. Years later I received an email from Cathy R. Boston, Ronald’s sister, telling me her niece had found my recollection of Ronald on the Internet. She wrote me: “So I decided to write you a short email to say thank you for writing and remembering. My mom and Dad never recovered, in fact the family never recovered from Ronnie’s death. The subsequent ‘wars’ have been protested in this household and will continue to be protested, Please do not give up the fight as u have not.”

I’ve forgotten the source but I also remember reading a small item about a mother in New York State mourning her soldier son’s death in Iraq. What’s it about, she asked? “Is it about oil? I don’t know what this war is for. We don’t want anyone else to die in this useless stupid war.”  

It’s hard to keep an accurate count of all the wars large and small this

country has fought and lost since 1945. Convincing parents to send their young men and women to war is a relatively simple matter. Flags will wave, bumper stickers will urge us to “support our troops,” stay-at-home pundits will approve, and support in polls will rise, at least until the dead and badly wounded start trickling home.  Herman Goering was among the worst of the worse, but he came pretty close to understanding how governments manipulate people. “It is always a simple matter to drag people along,” he said while awaiting his trial in Nuremberg. “All you have to do is tell them that they’re being attacked and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”

Even war lovers like Theodore Roosevelt and Rudyard Kipling changed their tunes once their sons died in WWI. Kipling tried to assuage his guilt and grief in this shattering couplet:

“If any question why we died

Tell them, because our fathers lied.”

Too late, Rudyard -- and Teddy too.