memorial day is weird for me. gramp got a purple heart because his arm almost got entirely blown off (unit was responsible for finding buried landmines https://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/... draggable="false" alt="🙃" title="Upside-down face" aria-label="Emoji: Upside-down face">) he never talked about it. he preferred to talk about his training in Japan, the friends he made, the language he learned 1/x

i didn& #39;t get as a kid that "grampy doesn& #39;t like to talk about the war" meant that he was severely traumatized by everything he saw. he& #39;s dead now, so i& #39;ll never truly know what happened to him over there. but i understand now why he wanted to focus on the few positives 2/x

he was the sweetest, goofiest grandad. never yelled at any of the grandkids, doted on my nana, and somehow not a racist old white guy on top of it. i wonder now if that softness was a result of witnessing the worst of humanity, and in all likelihood participating in it. 3/x

i hate that there was a part of my grampy so hurt that he could not speak of it. the sweet man who taught me how to play checkers and loved animals got chewed up and spit out by the military industrial complex. and for what? 4/x

I don& #39;t have a good end to this thread. war is hell and all drafting/enlisting seems to get you is trauma bonding and 10% off at K&G. what kind of smiles would grampy have had if he had never gone to war?