Veteran's Day Recollection
In my middle elementary school years in central Alabama, it
was common for boys and girls to play softball during recess. We played on two different
fields on the schoolyard. The field the boys played on was near the bank of a
large wooded ditch.
A batter, one day, hit the softball into the ditch. The male
teacher called “time out” until us boys climbed down the earthen bank into the
ditch to locate our only softball. Our group of perhaps as many as twenty young
boys searched the ditch dutifully.
I saw something on the ground. It was a metallic object
partially buried in the dirt. At first, I used my shoe to attempt to dislodge
the metallic object. After a few minutes I used my hands to remove it from its apparent
long term location in the Alabama soil.
After wiping away some cold, dark soil I realized I had a
discovered something unusual. I had seen similar objects in old war movies on
TV. While searching for a softball, I unearthed an object of war: A hand grenade
with its handle intact.
I showed the hand grenade to a playmate who displayed no interest
in it. He was busy looking for a softball, a sporting item, while I had located
a hand grenade an object intended to kill. My playmate’s mind was on sports and
my mind became fixed on the possibility the hand grenade could be dangerous. It
might explode as I handled it. It might explode if I threw it back on the
ground.
I climbed out of the wooded ditch as my playmates continued to
search for the softball. I could hear them talking and laughing as I carried
the hand grenade to the male teacher who stood patiently in the sun as his
students hunted for the lost softball.
I walked up to my teacher and handed him the hand grenade. It
is understatement to say It caught him by surprise. He took it from my hands
and confirmed what I knew I had found.
“Jimmy,” he said, eyes wide with astonishment, “you found a
hand grenade.”
We both looked at each other in silence. Perhaps we were
both thinking the same thought.
Thousands of miles away war raged in Vietnam. Newspapers
printed front page photos of dead and dying U.S. and Vietnamese troops. There
were photos of Vietnamese children crying at the corpse of a family member.
Perhaps it was their their last family member. Other photos showed Vietnamese
children, perhaps war orphans, standing alone looking at the horrors of war all
around them.
Perhaps my teacher and I were having the same thought as the
hand grenade, maybe a war souvenir from an Alabama veteran, brought the war in
Vietnam from the jungles thousands of miles away to our small Alabama
schoolyard and into our lives and minds.
My teacher was past the age of military service for Vietnam
but, in the mid 1906s, the war was in my future. War was in store for me and
all my playmates. Years later, some of my classmates volunteered as soon as
they could to escape school.
By the time I graduated high school, President Nixon had
ended the draft. Peace talks began. The war in Vietnam was in its final stages.
Some classmates never came back from Vietnam. I honor them, their service and sacrifice on
Veteran’s Day. Some classmates did return but were never the same for the acts
they committed and the death and destruction they saw and it overwhelmed their
minds. I can understand that. So can my elementary school teacher.
The hand grenade, a weapon of war, death and destruction, I
found as a youth in the wooded ditch while searching for a lost softball that
long ago day overwhelmed my young mind and that of my teacher as we stood in
silence and looked at it and into each other’s eyes. War and its weapons have a way of overwhelming
minds whether in faraway battlefields or my Alabama playground.
-30-
James Patterson, former U.S. diplomat, is a Washington
DC-based writer and speaker. JEPWriter@gmail.com
Valley (Alabama) Times News Wednesday November 9 2016 My hometown
newspaper
Old Dynamite Discovered Near Elementary School
LANETT — Two citizens cleaning up trash near
Huguley School Monday discovered an item that appeared to be a stick of old
dynamite in the 3900 block of 32nd Street SW and notified law enforcement.
Lanett Police Chief Angie Spates said officers responded to the location and
photographed the item, which was sent to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco,
Firearms and Explosives in Montgomery. "An agent with the Alabama Law
Enforcement Agency bomb squad was sent to the site and determined there was no
need for evacuation of the school but that all students and faculty should
remain inside of the enclosed building," said Spates. "Contact was
made with officials at Huguley Elementary to advise them of the situation and
the decision was made to put the school on soft lock-down until additional
agents arrived to take possession of the item." It was later determined
that the object found was indeed a stick of dynamite that could possibly have
been there since the early 1970s, but no longer contained ingredients that
could be used in a harmful manner. Due to the recovery process by bomb squad
personnel, parents encountered a road block when they went to the school to
pick up their children Monday afternoon, which was cleared shortly thereafter
and normal traffic resumed
My cousin Sandy in Vietnam circa 1960s.
My cousin Sandy in Busan South Korea 1954. Busan (부산 or 釜山(Korean pronunciation: pusʰan]), officially Busan Metropolitan City, romanized as Pusan before 2000, is South Korea's second-
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