Last week I went to the annual Veteran’s Art Sale at Parkwood Hospital here in London. Many people call it the ‘veteran’s hospital’. I attended the sale last year, too, and I think it will be my own little tradition.
Veterans in the art therapy program are invited to submit pieces for sale. They get to keep the cash from anything the volunteers sell on their behalf and there’s a wide range of items :hand-made greeting cards, ceramics, silk scarves, throw pillows, paintings – it’s impressive. And it’s cheap! I bought a beautiful scarf for our Aunt for $7. This year they put out stacks of very simply produced books called Tales Worth Telling. There were two volumes, from 2000 and 2003, containing first-person stories by veterans about their own lives. I bought volume one and I’m kicking myself for not just grabbing both of them.
In about two to five pages, each veteran tells his or her story. Some are funny, some tragic and some beautifully ordinary. Some of them go into detail about the war (mostly WWII) and some just give the date they entered the army and the date they left. They were so young, naive and optimistic, sometimes scared and other times, just following a path they felt was the right thing to do or was going to give them a good future.
One ex-soldier describes what it was like when his unit ran out of food overseas. He returned home at 6′ 2″, 118 lbs. Another explains the discomfort and overwhelming fatigue from living in a foxhole for days on end. One tells about chronic skin problems he suffered his whole life because of testing with mustard gas. Still another describes the detonation of a buzz bomb just outside of Antwerp that went off when he was about 16 feet away.
“My face was all burnt off; my hair was burnt off. I was blind for a week. Being so close to it is what saved me, though. I got the initial explosion, not the main part of it. It’s like when a horse goes to kick you, if you move in close to it all you get is just the start of the kick. You don’t get the full smash you would if you backed away. Explosions work exactly the same way.”
Women are included, too. They worked as nurses and interpreters. I’m most fascinated by the lives these people led after returning home from the war and the descriptions of their early lives before cars, when phone numbers were four digits long and kids dropped out of school at a young age to work on the family farm.
There’s very little lamenting in these stories. These veterans, in their 70s, 80s and 90s when they were interviewed, occasionally express regret over something seemingly minor. A fight with a sibling, perhaps, or talking back to a parent when they were very young. Each of them was asked to offer life advice and some of it’s wise (don’t smoke), some quaint (don’t hop from job to job) and some downright inadvisable (join the army and you’ll learn discipline). Every life has a story worth telling, in my view. I’m grateful that someone found it worthwhile to document the words of these interesting people before it was too late.