Reason with a View

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....