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Those of us who were in the military service - and in my generation only skiers went to Canada so that included everybody I knew - got a campaign medal of some sort. Mine was for the Korean “police action” and was an alternate blue and white striped ribbon from which dangled a pot-metal, half-dollar-sized bas relief of the globe flanked with olive branches or, maybe, palm fronds. This is the kind of thing one never can quite throw out - and yet has no idea what to do with. It’s like the First Communion prayer book from the godmother - which at age eight I wouldn’t have been seen dead with even if that attitude did flirt with the likely possibility of eternal damnation. The high school graduation diploma is in the same category: not the damnation part, but another non-displayable memento. (This did not, however, apply to the faux bronze baseball trophy which occupied place of honor through high school bedroom to college dorm to honeymoon first apartment and subsequent first split-level before being banished by first professional decorator.) The Korean campaign medal went with the things that mothers tuck away in the very rear of their glove drawer, where they join the ceramic handprint ashtray from long- gone times when people admitted they smoked. The Korean medal was supposed to represent something - something we all found hard to define at the time and would find impossible today. Basically, I guess it was awarded for showing up. And since then I’ve learned that half the thing in life is showing up—and sometimes it’s the only thing. All of this wandering thinking came from searching for cufflinks. Cufflinks are another of those things that go in the back of the sock drawer. That’s where they sit until the teen-age grandson has a part in a play that called for a tuxedo, which calls for a shirt which happens to have French cuffs. There is, indeed, a connection of some sort in all this. We found the cuff links and, with them, we found the faded ribbon and attached token. “Hey, gramps! What’s this?” His question was a shade past polite curiosity. But true, of course, to the unspoken code of 15-year-olds never to reveal any real interest in the answer. My grandson, Tommy, is no exception. “It’s a medal,” I said and knew instantly that I should have qualified that with “campaign medal” or something. I could tell when he looked at it, and actually read the raised lettering on the back, that he was thinking in terms of the Iwo Jima flag raising or Normandy invasion as presented in endless bites of sound and fury on cable television. “Geez,” he said. “Really?” A speculative look came my way that silently measured physique and personality with his version of a heroic image, and came up with confusion. “Everybody got one,” I had sense enough to amend my first answer. But I couldn’t just quit at that point. “Everybody who was there,” I added. “You were there?” He emphasized the “there” making it sound like Gettysburg. “Hey, that’s cool!” He looked at it again. “Hey, could I keep it a while - to show the guys? This is cool.” He tends to repeat things when talking to me - pretty much the way his grandmother does. What could I say but “yes?” Grandparents, I find, are not very often considered “cool” about much of anything. Whatever mental pictures he might have, mine remained the recollection of killing cold and the smell of fear and the stench of death and the misery of soldiers and civilian population alike - and trying to make myself as small as possible whenever it got noisy. His pictorial image, I suspect, would incline to the more dramatically heroic in a world in which story line wins out over accuracy every time. Maybe he’ll never have to find out. So, who am I to insist on being historically accurate? Not for me, thanks. Not when I can settle for “cool. |
