Around The Caskets Of My Brothers
May 2000
Slowly, like a priest performing
a ritual, he held an unlit cigarette aloft and said to our brother
Paul, "If I could only quit these." My 58-year old brother lit
the cigarette while nimbly placing a nitroglycerin tablet under
his tongue to ease the painful angina he was learning to live
with -- but not for long.
Herbie was found the next morning, curbside door open, reaching
into the glove compartment where a fresh pack of cigarettes and
a small bottle of nitro tablets awaited his need.
Now and then through the year I'll remember each of my five brothers,
perhaps on birthdays, on the anniversaries of their deaths, in
random thoughts, on finding a picture, a note ... but on Memorial
Day I remember them all at once and all together.
In the slide show of memory, I see them always smiling, always
smoking, whistling, singing, bounding up a flight of stairs, hopping
into a car, swinging my little self to their shoulders so deftly
the ash on their cigarettes never falls.
In this week of remembering, I see the veteran's cemetery where
my brothers lie beneath the endless rows of crisp white crosses
on the long green lawns. All of them survived the war after fighting
hand-to-hand on all fronts. They considered it just plain dumb
luck and referred sadly to the war dead as those who weren't lucky
enough to survive.
The marines who fell around Jack on Iwo Jima, as well as those
soldiers around Eddie in Germany, next to Herbie in the South
Pacific and with Bill in every theater of the war, are those we
remember of Memorial Day. Paul's fallen comrades were not trudging
next to him but were shot out of the sky in what they called "a
blaze of glory."
Those who didn't come home, we remember.
I was 10 when war broke out, old enough to remember goodbyes.
Bill was at the ready in the Rainbow Division out of New York
a year before Pearl Harbor. Jack, at 17, begged my mother to sign
him into the Marine Corps; Paul wanted to fly; Eddie and Herbie
-- married by then -- had to wait for the draft board to call
their numbers.
I recall their coming home, and Jack's in particular. He opened
up his big foot locker and there was nothing in it but Camel cigarettes.
They were placed in individual packs bottom to top with the camels
facing in the same direction, as if each pack were placed there
with love.
And so began the real battle to survive in a war they would one
day lose. There are survivors to this war, too, but I wouldn't
call them lucky. I remember my personal heroes and see them again
in the eyes of men of a certain age wearing oxygen in a stylish
shoulder carrier, thin plastic hose attached delivering life directly
to their nostrils. It's bigger than a pack of cigarettes but,
just like the old days, they don't go anywhere without it.
The enemy of these heroes was not someone they recognized from
newsreels, but one they see when the doctor says, "Let's put you
in the hospital for a few days to run some tests." I saw the enemy
when they were still his prisoners, trying to find someone to
sneak them a cigarette, begging for one with nearly their last
laboring breath.
The life of these heroes ceased to be about the battles they won,
but about the one they lost, never knowing they were being seduced
by an enemy with propagandists more alluring and glamorous than
any Tokyo Rose or Axis Sally. The enemy's war posters featured
their own icons, the beauty queens of Hollywood and the rugged
cowboys of the American West.
If they claim they got through WWII, Korea, Vietnam, with "dumb
luck," they can be just as terse about their losing battle against
this foe. "Who knew?", the foot soldiers in this army -- men,
women and Joe Camel's kids -- whether still smoking or having
escaped the enemy -- will always say.
"Who
knew?" In the last decade we've discovered exactly who knew, and
the tobacco giants are at last being held accountable for slaying
without mercy, without honor, our millions of heroes, brothers,
husbands and sons.
In our family of nine, there was no history of heart disease;
the previous generation lived into their 80's and 90's. Until
my brothers, no death certificate ever read, "Cardiac arrest,
smoking related."
Mourning our brothers, we sisters screamed "Take that! You big
bully!" to the tobacco industry now having to pay up. But I can
hear my brothers saying, "There, there, you're supposed to love
your enemy." And I would shout back, "Even if it kills you?"
These brothers had double, triple, quadruple and finally quintuple
bypasses, in ascending order of their age, the number determined
more by scientific advances than their need at the time. They
spent the rest of their lives after surgery trying to figure out
how to steal back into the smokers' trenches without detection.
Memorial services for those heroes felled in foreign regions include
words like "proud," and "honor," and "hero." Around the caskets
of my brothers, mourners sigh, "I tried to tell him," or "He wouldn't
listen, he thought cigarettes were his friends. Hmmmph, some friend."
And, always, "So young, so much to live for; you'd think he'd
know better." Those grieving know better than to suggest a character
weakness in not being able to quit. The mettle of these men was
tested a long time ago. Their characters were strong. At Calverton
Cemetery, far out on Long Island, a recording plays "Taps," and
young members of the Armed Forces fold the flag adorning the coffin,
saying to the widow as the flag is handed to her: "... presented
to you on behalf of a grateful nation."
And we are a grateful nation. We're the ones who are "just lucky,
I guess," to have known, loved and been loved by men and women
who fought and died bravely to protect what we have.
In a week like this, put aside for remembering, we can't help
thinking of how they lived and how they died. A war widow or a
gold-star mother might ask herself in a reflective moment, "What
was it all for?"
My brothers, my heroes, fell to a home-front enemy masked as a
friend, one they finally defended to their deaths. This week,
I take my own long, dark moment to ask, "Was it all worth it?"
Only they could answer that.
|
