It's mid-morning, on a weekend day in Central New York, and the cows are mooing out in the pasture. There's also the occasional bleating of a sheep, from somewhere nearby. But what's missing are the smells: the turned earth, the fresh ensilage, the cow manure. Especially the cow manure. (Which, I'm guessing, will only make sense if you've experienced life on an old-time dairy farm.)
My father used to tell how he and his brothers would get up early, do the morning chores--the feeding, milking, cleaning of stalls, then eat a quick breakfast and head off to school. Where, even in the small town near where he grew up in Northwestern Pennsylvania, the farm kids were treated as second-class citizens by the town kids.
After that came the war and his brother Bob's Purple Hearts and Bronze Stars, won as an infantry squad leader supporting Patton's 4th Armored Division in its sweep across Nazi-occupied Europe. Which coincided with dad's assignment to ETO headquarters in Paris where, late one night, he was advised of Bob's imminent arrival on the train of horrors which had transported him from the battlefield, alive but wounded, enroute to one of the hospitals that dad's engineering section had helped build in liberated France.
By then, he knew the city of Paris like the back of his hand and had a jeep at his disposal because he was in charge of the GI motorpool. When he arrived at the depot, train after train was pulling in with its moaning, bloody cargo. Dad said that he looked into a thousand dead and dying faces that night, in the desperate search for his brother. But if the images of that night, which gave him nightmares for years afterward, were horrific, the smells of it were infinitely worse.
Finally, he found his brother and, after learning which hospital he would be transported to, sped through the streets of Paris to be there when he arrived. And in the week that followed, he would spend several hours each day keeping Bob company as Army surgeons extracted the metal fragments of a German grenade which had exploded near him and lodged in his arms, legs, shoulders, and back.
(He also recalled that when the OR staff began prepping Bob for his initial treatment, they first removed a heavy, non-regulation cowhide vest that he'd been wearing which had obviously taken the brunt of the explosion. When they shook the vest, and the fragments lodged in it fell to the floor, it had literally sounded like falling rain. And when asked where he'd gotten the vest, he replied that he'd taken it off of a dead German.)
To distract Bob from this painful process, which went on for a few hours at a time over several days, they would reminisce about the hardships and blessings of growing up on the farm.
During one of these sessions, dad said to his brother, "Did you ever notice how the town kids always kept their distance from us?"
To which his brother replied, "Well, we did smell like cow shit!" And then they both laughed at Bob's matter-of-fact response to this once-defining indignity.
But now, on this frigid, sunny morning, so many miles and decades removed from farms and battlefields and heroism and horror, there are no smells accompanying the bovine voices because they're emanating from the Minecraft video game being played by my grandson in our living room. And because it's in our living room, I have no problem with this minor breach in the realism of these digital worlds being created by my grandson and his internet friends. (I've also heard a digital dog barking and am similarly grateful that I don't have to watch where I step.)
I've also been able to rationalize the time he spends this way by reasoning that, while he's not out sawing boards and sorting bricks, he's in fact using something akin to the imaging resources of a real-world CADD (Computer-Aided Design and Drafting) program. But then I think about some of the other games he plays and their respective breaches of reality and what their message may be to him and his friends.
In particular, I think about "Call of Duty," especially popular among boys from my grandson's age to those in their thirties and forties and beyond. For whatever reason, my first thought is to somehow avoid joining the chorus of universally-ignored voices decrying the casual ease of the digital deaths and woundings, the utter unreality of repeated killings and resurrections that occur in a single cycle of one of these games.
But then I remember hearing that, shortly after the war, my dad and his brother had taken a casual walk up through the ancient orchard which had been a vibrant center of their life as kids. There, beyond earshot of the family, Dad asked his brother if he had killed the German soldier whose fortuitously-acquired vest had shielded his vital organs from the otherwise lethal grenade blast.
And this time, there was no wry humor, no good-natured sarcasm. There was only silence, the dark retreat of those who had answered the real world's "call of duty," and would struggle, in some cases, not to be defined by the sounds and sights and smell of it for the rest of their lives.
There was another brother, his name was George, and before the war he had left the farm and earned bachelor's and master's degrees in mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania. Then he went to war, like his brothers, and served on a hospital ship. And when he came home his nerves were shattered and he was never the same.
It wasn't a game and the screaming, convulsing, malodorous vision of the dead and dying so wounded him that he was never the same. That was what they said of him afterward: that he. was never. the same.
But now it's mid-morning, on a weekend day in Central New York. The cows are mooing in their digital pasture and there's really nothing else to hear or see or smell...
LPK
LiveJournal
2.28.2015 (a)
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