| Aside from the
sergeants, I was the oldest enlisted man in the unit, and the younger
guys were like my kid brothers. Just after Christmas, walking past the
darkened room of Bobby Joe from Tennessee, I saw him head in hands.
"What's going on?" I asked.
"Ah jist came back from a week's leave in Tinsea. Momma tole me ahve heurt her most grievously."
"You hurt your mother?"
"She tole me it's mah aaceynt. Ahve been up heah in Yankeeland, in Virginyah, and I done lost mah Tinsea aaceynt."
"Don't worry, you'll get your
accent back as soon as you get back home." I was reminded of Robert
Service's lines about the cremation of Sam McGee from Tennessee, where
the cotton blooms and blows. Why he left his home in the South God only
knows.
"Let me tell you a Christmas
shtory to cheer you up," I said to him as he cocked his head to the
side with my Yiddish for story. "When I was a kid, around Christmas
time, without telling my mom, my dad took me to Jordan Marsh in Boston,
a big department store, to sit on Santa Claus's knee. So Santa asked me
what I'd like for Christmas and I told him that we celebrated Hanukah
instead because we were Jewish. Then he bent down and whispered in my
ear, Ayn lang leben oif dein kepeleh. Yiddish for a long life on your
sweet little head."
"What'd he mean, sweet little haid?"
Bobby Joe never did get it.
| | Sometimes Bobby Joe
and I played tennis. A natural athlete, he was the only guy I ever saw
who hit only forehands, shifting the racquet from his left to his right
hand. Playing one spring day, I hit a lob, and he charged back to
retrieve it, missed, and smashed against the chain-link fence. When I
saw him, speechless, staring down at his right forearm, blood squirting
out in two streams, each spurt timed to a heartbeat, I cleared the net
and ran over to him. As soon as I grabbed his arm, his eyes rolled back
in his head and he dropped to the ground. My Army training was seldom
used, but I remembered two magic words, DIRECT PRESSURE. While yelling
for an ambulance, I clutched his arm where two rusty pieces of metal
wire holding the fence together had punctured an artery. He must have
thought he was dying, but the spurting blood had cleansed his wound and
my hand pressing on his arm finally stopped the bleeding. After he was
released by the medics, I suggested he tell his mom that a Yankee saved
his life. I don't know whether he told her or not, but he never played
tennis with me again. | |