Grandfather Charlie

Today is Veterans Day, and this year, for the first time, I know what my grandfather actually did in the war.

I didn't know him well. He died in Ohio in June of 1986, when I was nine years old. What I knew about him came through my dad. He grew up poor. He had an eighth-grade education and had to go to work young. He had to leave school to work the family's farm when his dad left. He could build just about anything with his hands — his own air compressors, his own tools — and never made much money doing it. He had a heart attack in his early fifties and went on disability. When my dad started working in high school, he made more money than Grandfather Charlie did.

And this: Dad said he served in the Navy in World War II, on a ship called the Wichita, and that he saw very heavy combat in the Pacific.

For years, that was all we had. A story.

This fall I went looking for the records — the Navy's muster rolls, the lists of who was aboard each ship and when. And I found him.

Charles Warren Tickle. He enlisted on September 3, 1943, at Huntington, West Virginia. He was twenty-one years old. After training at Great Lakes, he was received aboard the USS Wichita on December 7, 1943 — two years to the day after Pearl Harbor.

He was a fireman. Not the kind with a hose — the Navy kind, the men down in the engine rooms who kept the boilers lit and the ship moving. The mechanically gifted kid from a poor family ended up exactly where you'd expect. By August of 1944, he had risen to Fireman First Class.

And the family story about the combat? That part was true. In 1944, with my grandfather in her engine rooms, the Wichita fought her way across the Pacific — Kwajalein and Eniwetok in the Marshalls, the raid on Truk, Hollandia, Saipan, the Battle of the Philippine Sea, Guam, Morotai. That is as heavy as the Pacific war got, and he was there for it.

The records corrected us on a couple of things, and I'll take the truth over the legend. He left the Wichita in the fall of 1944, before Leyte Gulf — that battle belongs to the ship, but not to him. His Okinawa came later, on a second ship, the escort carrier Cape Gloucester, covering minesweepers in July of 1945. He came home that December.

Here's the detail that got me. Months ago, I rattled off two dates from memory — December 7, 1943, and January 13, 1944 — and then I took them back, sure I'd mistyped them. I hadn't. Those are the dates of his first Wichita records. Somewhere along the way I must have seen the truth, and it stayed with me even when I didn't trust it.

He came home to Buchanan County, Virginia, and raised a family. He gave his son — my dad, Kedrick — his own middle name, Warren. He worked with his hands the rest of his life. He died at sixty-four.

Most veterans aren't famous. They're poor kids with an eighth-grade education who stood their watch in a hot engine room on the far side of the world, came home, and built a life out of whatever they could make with their hands. The whole country runs on men like that.

For a while, all we had of his war was a story. Now we have his name, in the Navy's own hand, on the rolls of the ship he served. I'm glad the record kept him.

Happy Veterans Day, Grandfather.