Face to Face With WWII: Stories From Our Last Veterans

Iwo Jima

I volunteered at hospice for a few short months, which was all I could take. Every weekend I would visit patients and talk to them, read, play games, or maybe watch a film together. This also meant getting to know someone as they were slipping away and trying to provide support emotionally during the last moments of their lives. It was probably the heaviest thing I’ve ever experienced and I wasn’t mentally strong enough to continue. However, I do look back on the people I met during my time there and remember them fondly.

I had been finishing my time with a patient and was getting ready to head down to the lobby. A slender man with a beaming smile lifted his hand to catch my attention.

“I’ve traveled to every continent, been to Paris fourteen times, and I never saw a face as pretty as you.”

I busted out laughing, appreciating the lie. Props for the best pickup line since 1943. I’m sticking that in a novel someday. 

I sat down at the table and started chatting with him. He told me everything about his family, what his granddaughters had studied in college, asking me about my studies. Afterwards, I inquired further about his travels. He had been in WWII and I imagine was one of the last veterans we had with us. I told him that my grandfather had served in Iwo Jima and had long since passed away. My grandfather was not much older than eighteen when he was shipped off to Japan. His stories live on as landmines in my brain.

He and a friend had been exploring an area deemed off limits, surely just for the sake of it. They didn’t know it had been riddled with mines. He saw his best friend explode standing right next to him for the sake of the decision they had made.

“Do you want to know how they punished me?” he would say. “Two weeks of shoveling bodies.”

He was a young man (at my age, one I would consider no more than a boy) coming face to face with the cruelest parts of our humanity. I could only imagine the never-ending mass of gray flesh, vacant eyes, lives lost, and seeming like it would never end. For years he would scream out into the night. My grandmother said she would not disturb him, or else he would never sleep. He committed his life to studying psychology, trying the fight the monsters that lived in his own mind. This man sitting next to me seemed to be at peace. He talked about the war as if it was a grand adventure, getting to tour all of Europe. Maybe at that age that’s how we see things, shining the spotlight on what’s beautiful and letting the rest slip away into the abyss.