Photo by Jim Greenhill | CC by 2.0
My 93-year-old mother is a recipient of America’s ultimate booby-prize, the Gold Star: her beloved older brother John, for whom I was named, died in World War II when the B-52 he was piloting crashed in the South China Sea. But our family has suffered in every declared American war going back to the Civil War, when my great-grandfather—another John—was grievously wounded fighting for the Union in the Battle of Richmond in 1862; we still possess his dog-tags, discharge papers, and the misshapen musket ball that a battlefield surgeon cut out of his stomach. In 1917, my grandfather John, though already in his 40s, enlisted as a doughboy and fought in the trenches in France, where he was mustard-gassed, leaving his voice a husky rasp for the rest of his life.
My great-grandfather barely survived that musket-ball wound. After lying unattended and bleeding in an abandoned schoolhouse for two days, following one of the Confederacy’s greatest victories, he was rescued by fellow Union soldiers and smuggled onto a hay-barge going up the Ohio River, and then he made a long odyssey on foot back to his Indiana farm. When he came to the door, he was so emaciated that his wife at first had no idea who he was. Had he been just a bit less lucky, and determined, I would never have been born.
But it was her brother’s death that left a gaping wound in my mother’s soul, a wound from which she never recovered. John was the older brother who…