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Memorial Day - Bobby and Uncle Vinny

Posted by: Anne-Marie Hislop on May 25, 2009 at 8:34AM CST

Two people come to mind for me each Memorial Day - Bobby McCluskey and my Uncle Vinny.

Bobby, a grade school and high school classmate, died in Vietnam on the first anniversary of our HS graduation. He was a very clean cut kid with red hair - my mother used to say that Bobby was the kind of kid who always looked as if he had just stepped out of the shower. Bobby was the second of five boys - their mom was a widow, whose husband had died while we were still in grade school. As I remember it, Bobby volunteered for the Marines and intended to use the GI bill to go to college afterwards. Afterwards never came. A fine young life lost. A good son and good brother cut down without ever having the chance to marry or have kids or a career. What a loss!

Uncle Vinny did not actually die in WWII - but he might as well have. Vinny was one of my mom's 3 brothers. Whenever his name came up, my mom would sigh and say, "Vinny was never the same after the war." Vinny was a medic who carried bodies, who carried soldiers with limbs blown off, or faces shattered, or heads blown open, who carried body parts, from the bloody battle fields as the Allies marched up the boot of Italy. Vinny did not die until 1968, but his life was marginal - he lived in boarding houses, worked odd jobs, somehow kept himself afloat, never married, probably drank too much - maybe he had PTSD, I don't know. Whatever the effect, that war experience in some way robbed him of his life...

War is indeed hell.

Send This | Categories: Memorial day

(2) Comments

Posted by: Goodbye on May 25, 2009 10:01AM CST

Thanks for those reminders.

Posted by: reuther on May 26, 2009 7:41AM CST

I knew a nice young man who was killed over there.
Have been reading a little about Kipling and how he resented liberal-passivist ideas that peace is the normal condition of man with war an aberration.
Perhaps we were flexing our muscles over there. It seemed like such a waste.
Kipling wrote some verse that says the worst thing we can do though where the military lost are concerned is to suggest that they died for a "waste-cause," if you will.
You can't help feeling the waste in it no matter how valid the cause.

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