You have the Greatest Grandparents!
You have the Greatest Grandparents…let me explain why I know this. The children of WWII parents, like my brothers and I and even some of you reading this, all have a common theme. We had parents that fought in the most brutal world war, witnessed some of mankind’s worst atrocities and maybe talked with us about it for half an hour. You may have heard fifteen minutes of their stories.
Your grandparents were all superheroes. You had the Greatest Grandparents from the Greatest Generation. It might not seem it yet, but it will sink in. When they were younger, they lived during the worst and best times the world had to offer. Their parents were battle hardened from World War One, beat the bad guys and then returned home to survived the Swine Flu that killed people in almost every family. Before WWII, your grandparents and great grandparents probably had to wait in lines for bread and soup. Their country and world was in the midst of financial depression. But Grandma and Grampa would show resilience and strength better than any superhero on a Saturday morning cartoon.
When the United States entered WWII in 1941, your grandparents changed gears like flipping a switch. They enlisted and got drafted to fight a war. No one needed or wanted a safe zone or sanctuary city. They would have been disgraced. Your grandfather learned to fight, hand-to-hand combat, fly airplanes, drive tanks and sleep in snow, mud and torrential rain, in a land far far away. With Nazi’s and Japanese soldiers plotting ways to kill your grandparents any way they could. They all knew they may not survive the fighting, bombings, starvation, prison camps and non-stop battles— the physical and mental drain being put on them almost every minute of every hour of every day for 3-4 years. They were only about 20 years old themselves at the time. Super-Grandpa? You bet. They all had a motto deep inside, many didn’t even know it. I know what it was and I’ll explain soon.
You see, I’m a little worried. Ok, maybe a little more than a little. It’s almost your turn to pick up where we left off. It was my responsibility and your fathers and mothers, to teach you the stories about your Super-Hero grandparents. But most of us don’t have enough of those stories to share with you. Or we didn’t hear all of it, or enough to understand and share. So we watched black and white movie clips to fill in what we didn’t know. Our parents didn’t tell us enough, they came home from war, tucked their capes and boots in an old foot locker in the garage, and never took them out again. Go look for yourself and see, they are still there. They didn’t tell us and we didn’t ask. Now we have to scramble. I’m worried because you don’t know what their lives were really like. Even though you have much of their magic in your genes, you can’t harness that magic if you don’t know it exists…but it does…it’s there. Cool huh? You’ll only know if you research and find out what they were like, then share it with your own children and keep Grandpa’s superpowers going for another generation. Even better, Grandpa left it up to you how to use them.
Gramps has been providing clues all along. You haven’t seen them? His flag waving in the yard? His songs on his radio station? How about his nice old friends, the guy with the anchor tattoo on his forearm or your friends grandfather who has the TV up so loud you can hear it driving by? Yup—all superheroes. Better hurry and ask them because many of gramps stories happened long ago where they didn’t get service on their cell phones to take pictures. They will tell you about those years of incredible strength, even more than they told us.
To calm my own fears of losing Grampa’s stories, I sat with many of them and just asked. Your grandpa shared with me many stories he didn’t even tell your dad or uncles. Your Mom and Dad sat there in complete amazement while grandpa looked out the window from his overstuffed ripped old chair and remembered in great detail how he and his friends outsmarted the devil himself. Your grandfather and even grandmother would talk to me how after they worked with all the other grandparents, they saved the world from certain tyranny. Unreal huh? Nope, all true.
Oh yeah, the motto was simple,”I’m going home.” That’s it, no matter what, they were determined to come home. It hit home when I heard another son like me, telling me his dad was thinking that as he was fighting an enemy soldier with fists and a knife. One of them was to be killed right there, the other was to return home. Mikes dad barely returned home, but did. But the enemy soldier didn’t. Only one was going to return and he was thinking, “I’m going home.”
Please read and share “My Father’s War: Memories from Our Honored WWII Soldiers” then sit with your grandfather and your father and ask. You can’t wait for them to bring it up, they won’t, ever! Then it’ll be too late, the magic will be forgotten and lost forever.
Charley Valera
Author, “My Father’s War: Memories from Our Honored WWII Soldiers”
As seen on NBC, NECN, Cable television, book presentations and signings. #MyFathersWarBook
