Blood: Medal

32

Thou shalt not kill.

Exodus 20:13

This commandment forbids murder, not the forms of killing authorized for Israel, e.g., war or capital punishment.

Note to Exodus 20:13

The New Oxford Annotated Bible

Thou shalt do no murder. Lord have mercy upon us. and incline our hearts to keep this law.

The Book of Common Prayer

There had to be something somewhere in all of them, in all of us, that loved it. Some dark, aggressive, masochistic side of us, racial perhaps, that makes us want to spray our blood in the air, throw our blood away, for some damned misbegotten ideal or other. Whether the ideal is morally right or wrong makes no difference so long as the desire to fight for it remains in us. Fanatics willing to die for ideals. It was territory, back when we were animals. Now that we have evolved into higher beings and learned to talk, territoriality has moved up a step higher with us, and become ideals. We like it. Cynical as it sounds, one is about led to believe that only the defeated and the dead really hate war. And of course, as we all know, they do not count.

James Jones, WWII

I still have a box that used to rest on the bureau in my grandparents’ bedroom. It has a leather-like covering that is now a deep mahogany color and has the logo of a tobacco company on it. In my grandparents’ time it had treasures in it — cufflinks, an Illinois pocket watch, a church collection envelope with petunia seeds in it, and a medal for service on the local draft board during World War II. The box sat on the top of the bureau alongside photographs of my grandparents’ four children, two young men and two young women. One of the women was the my mother and one of the men was the father of my cousins. The other two I never knew. The woman wore a high-necked dress and had dark eyes and hair done into a tight bun — Ruth, dead from TB sometime in the 30’s. The other was a man in uniform whose death will be forever a mystery since all who might know the truth are now also dead and at the time no one spoke of him — Floyd. He was only a photo and a name on a tombstone.

In the cedar-smelling closet there was no uniform for my grandfather to wear his medal on. I wondered, then, why the medal was in the box and what it meant.

Part of what it meant was connected to the courthouse square. No respectable county seat is without monuments on its courthouse square. They memorialize at least the Civil War, World War One (called the Great War on many of the monuments), World War Two, and other conflicts great and small. Crawford County, Arkansas is no different.

Most of those squares also have a bench or two where people can sit and feed pigeons and squirrels, which was what I often did with my grandfather and at least once, I seem to remember, with my Aunt Edyce, widow of the man in the uniform on the bureau. In my memory she was a woman who was oddly sexless, a woman who sat on the fringes of family gatherings.

Sometimes I ran my fingers across the raised letters on the bronze plaques or the letters carved into marble and granite, the names, the names. It did not occur to me to ask why these names? Why this specific name? Nor was I the only one who did not, does not ask.

I now know that in my grandfather’s time, in the 40’s, a roll was made of every male child in the county, not unlike the call for enumeration by Caesar Augustus commemorated each Christmas. All the sons of Crawford County were listed and classified. Their names were put forward to a selection committee that had been chosen from among the elders of the community. Eventually and at last all those selected went out of the county. For some of those men all that now remained was a name on a monument. They passed forever even from the memory of the community, as have the names of their elders who sat on the board and were given their medals at the end of their service.