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Of honor and tears

As my uncle rolled my grandfather’s wheelchair past the “Pacific Theater” half of the National World War II Memorial, Grandpa pointed out each place he’d been:

“Bataan. New Guinea. Leyte. Luzon. Manika. Okinawa. Yep, I was there.”

I’d had no idea.

Rain dripped from his umbrella into his lap, and I had to lean in close to hear his words over the rush of the fountains behind him.

My grandpa, Archie Kennedy, flew out from Chicago on an Honor Flight on April 15 with my uncle, Daryl Kennedy. The Honor Flight program sends World War II veterans free of charge to Washington, D.C., so they can see their memorial.

I’d never heard his stories before. Like most of the “greatest generation,” Grandpa had kept all but the funny stories to himself. He didn’t want to hurt anyone with what he’d experienced. It strikes me as odd, too, that my family wouldn’t talk about it more. When I go home, my grandpa loves to brag about how his granddaughter is also a combat vet — I served in Operation Desert Storm with the 3rd Armored Division and in Mogadishu, Somalia, with the 10th Mountain Division. My Vietnam-era-veteran uncles, Daryl and Doug, and father, Dallas, like to take me to the local VFW for beers.

But the first time I had any inkling of how much Grandpa had been through as an Army combat medic came after I wrote a story about the medics I’d met in Adhamiya, Iraq. In June 2007, I embedded with Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 26th Infantry Division, and I followed “Doc” Timothy Ray through a day that would be one of the worst for both of us: A deeply buried roadside bomb blew up one of his platoon’s Bradleys, killing five soldiers and an Iraqi interpreter.

Back in the U.S., “Doc” Kennedy, now 88, read that story (http://www.militarytimes.com/savinglives). My grandmother, Audrey Kennedy, sent me an e-mail.

“Grandpa felt like he was right back there with you, remembering all the horrors,” she wrote. “We both shed some tears.”

I cried a lot over that day — June 21 — but my grandmother’s note started me all over again. Sixty years. It made me cry for future generations, too — for the medics I met in Iraq who already are protecting others from their stories.

At the memorial, Grandpa matter-of-factly told me things I had never heard before.

When I was a kid, a Japanese sword hung on the wall of my grandparents’ family room. We sort of knew some crazy story about a Japanese officer who had jumped into Grandpa’s foxhole. But the sword had never been sharpened — it was fresh from the factory — so I thought the story was just a family tall tale.

Here’s what really happened: On Okinawa, my grandfather and a pal sat in a foxhole in the deepest dark they had ever experienced, still scarred from the death they’d seen as they swam to shore from their landing craft. A Kamikaze pilot had crashed into Grandpa’s craft after he’d left it, and he knew men had died. He arrived at Leyte the first day of the attack, before the artillery fire began, but he told me hundreds of men drowned under the weight of their gear or simply because they didn’t know how to swim and the water was too deep. On shore, he treated the ones he could.

In the foxhole, he waited in the dark, knowing the Japanese were coming. A Japanese soldier jumped into the hole, lifted his sword, and brought it down hard on Grandpa’s friend, hitting him in the helmet.

Grandpa’s friend grabbed hold of the sword with both hands and yelled, “Shoot him! Shoot him!”

As a medic, Grandpa wasn’t supposed to carry a weapon. But in the Pacific, being a medic offered no protection from enemy fire.

Grandpa pulled his .45 out of his shoulder holster and emptied seven rounds in the dark, hoping to hit the Japanese man as he grappled with the sword — and not his friend. After he emptied the weapon, Grandpa loaded another clip.

“I think you got him,” his friend said.

Grandpa then bandaged up his friend’s fingers, which had been sliced almost completely through. They spent the rest of the night in the foxhole with the dead man. Grandpa’s friend took the sword with him when he flew out as a casualty. A friend of the family brought back the display sword from Okinawa for Grandpa years later.

Grandpa told me so many stories — about the march through enemy lines to Luzon that was featured in “The Great Raid,” and about being asked if he was mentally OK to continue after a munitions dump exploded, sending “pieces of men everywhere.” He talked about making booze out of pineapples left to sit in the sun, and about the problems the Army had with medics using their morphine recreationally — or to deal with what they’d seen in the field. Grandpa amputated limbs, fed starving prisoners and had to give up on troops sawed in half by mortar explosions.

I hadn’t known any of it.

During his trip to see the columns and wreaths and eagles representing strength and courage and hope, someone mentioned that 1,200 World War II vets are dying every day, and that their stories need to be told.

Grandpa closed his eyes and shook his head so that his chin almost touched his chest.

“Yes, they do,” he said.

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The writer is an Army Times reporter.