My Great Grandfather trained horses during WWI.
My grandmother served as a nurse in the Pacific. She told me about beautiful sunsets that dyed the water orange, and about how men died from infected cuts before the penicillin could reach them.
My grandfather nearly drowned in the Gulf of Mexico, 1968. Thrown from a landing craft during maneuvers. He said that it is men who win wars, not circuits, not aluminum and steel, but men.
As a Colonel, my uncle flew SEAD missions in Iraq. Burning hard, hoping to spot the black dots on the desert before they became white trails of smoke. He told me that the thought of being killed was so much less scary than the thought of failing his mission or failing his squadron.
My father sat on alert on snowy runways. He waited to loft 200 tons of nuclear-armed strategic bomber up into the air, out over the arctic circle, and away across the hard lines of the Cold War. He told me what it was like to sit on the tarmac, not knowing if it was all just a drill, or if the MIRVs had already separated in the firmament. He told me about listening to the BBC on the car radio while driving to his hanger to fly to Iraq. He was over the Atlantic when Desert Storm ended.
He told me that there is more honor in peace than in war, which I never really believed until I saw children playing soccer with scars on their faces.
This is the second of four poems in a collection called “The Four of Cups”