Patriotic Duty

A Tale of Personal Courage and Ignominy

Sometime in late 1946 , when I was six years old, before my father returned from Japan, I marched, wearing my dress uniform and carrying an American flag, up the stairs and into the small private clinic where I was going to have my tonsils removed.  My mother was alone, living with my Grandma, nervous and sick all the time, and so she was supported by her uncle Mr Sam Salzburger.  In fact, when I try to remember what happened during this episode in my life, there is nothing there about my mother at all, only Mr Salzburger, Sam,  He must have been a Godsend for her, helping out where no one else seemed able.  And I would have liked to think of myself then as a brave soldier doing my patriotic duty on behalf of my mother.

            So on that special day, all dressed up in the uniform my Grandpa Moe made for me because he was a cloth-cutter, carrying the star-spangled banner, I marched up the steps of the hospital for the operation.  I don’t remember anyone with me because I was so proud to be a brave hero helping my father kill all the nasty Japs and Nazis.  This would be different than the pictures of buck-tooth Japs I would draw with crayons, then loudly colour in bullets and arrows to kill them, and hang the drawings in the front window, so passers-by could give the V for Victory sign with their fingers.  This would be an act of great courage.  Into the Valley of Death.  Hooray for me!

I do vaguely remember someone reassuring me the operation wouldn’t hurt too much and I could eat as much ice cream as I wanted for a whole day or two.  That, it seemed to me, would be better than ten golden medals with points and ribbons and a special gold star certificate you hang on the window if a soldier gets killed, or a purple heart mothers put up there too when one of their brave boys is hurt in the war. 

A day or two later—I can’t be sure now, and was certainly not sure then—I woke up with a pain in the back of my mouth and down my throat, and then I saw Mr Salzburger standing next to the bed and looking down at me with a big smile.  He was there to comfort me.  To congratu-late me on my personal victory.  My contribution to the war effort.  Good as a One Hundered Dollar War Bond.

However, as soon as I saw him, I called him a very bad name and right after that I heard my mother come up to me and say stop it, and she did something she never did before or after: she smacked me on my face.  I had no idea why all these terrible things were happening to me.

There is so much violence in the world.  Too many wars, too many robber gangs, robbers, guerrillas, and now terrorists and militants.  There are civil wars and insurgencies, rebellions and coups d’état.  Everywhere you turn.  Maybe never so much as in that decade from 1935 to 1945.  I was born right in the middle of it. Executions, assassinations, attacks, confrontations, madness and fanaticism.  It is sometimes too much to bear.  And that slap from my own mother—why?  I could not fathom what I had done to deserve such a thing.  Why?

Everything inside me trembled with pain and humiliation.  When my eyes cleared a little, because the tears had flowed copiously, and the sting went so deep into my heart that I could not imagine there could be such depths to the unsettled feelings, I tried to look around the room.  My mother was in a corner, in a chair, her face turned away from me, her shoulders trembling, as though she were the person who was hurt.  Then I saw Mr. Salzburger, still standing at the foot of the bed, his big smile now straightened out into a single thick line under his moustache, his eyes staring at me intently, intensely, inquisitively, as though he wanted to know really badly why I said the bad word to him. 

“You have a pain still in the throat, boychik?” he asked.

I looked at him in wonder.  What was he saying to me?

“So, it will go away.  It’s not so bad.”

What could I answer him?  I could not understand anything, and tried to feel my face underneath where my mother slapped me, but could not, could not go beyond the stinging feeling, and so there seemed no meaning in what Mr. Salzburger said or what I had said.

“You shouldn’t be broigas with me, boychik.  Let me tell the nurse to give by you a little ice-cream, vanilla, you should feel better, maybe.  Oy, oy, oy, this is some world, eh, boychik?”

“Ice-cream,” I said.  What else could I have said?

“You’re a brave soldier boy,” he said.  “Your father will be proud.  Like a real hero.”

Today it is hard for me to remember this incident.  Not so hard to picture it again as a memory but hard to live with what I now know my words meant to my mother and to Mr. Salzburger.  So someday I will tell you his real name.