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Larry Poulin
When I was a little girl I would hunt for treasure in my house. I’d search everywhere, in my mother’s underwear drawer, behind the couch, downstairs in the creepy cellar in the wardrobe full of dusty, old coats. I found the brown box full of ribbons and medals on the top shelf of that rickety wardrobe one rainy Saturday.
Triumphant, I clutched it to my chest and ran up the stairs. Sneezing from the dust, I showed my step dad.
“Daddy! Look! Look what I found! Treasure!” I sneezed again and handed him the box.
He sighed and opened it. “Treasure, huh?”
“Uh-huh, look.” I pointed out what I thought were the coolest pieces. “Do you know where it came from? We could probably sell it and make millions!”
He smiled. He touched a fancy bar of colors. Then he closed the box and handed it back to me. “You keep it. Okay?”
“Where did it come from?”
“They’re mine. They’re from the War.”
I didn’t know a lot about World War II back then. I knew about concentration camps. I knew about genocide. I didn’t really know a lot of the details. And I didn’t know anything about what my step dad did, only that he was in the Navy, only that he saw his friends die.
“Are they your medals, Daddy?”
“Yep. They’re my medals, Carrie.”
“Do they have stories?”
“They have stories.”
“Will you tell me?”
“Sometime,” he said, scruffing up my hair. “I’ll tell you when you get a little bigger.”
But he didn’t. He died when I was almost in sixth grade. He took his stories with him.
My husband’s father, Ben, was in the war too. He was an officer stationed in Europe. All I know about it is that he saw horrible things and that his men once accidentally shot a horse because they thought it was the enemy.
“We were kids, then,” Ben said after he told the story. “Just dumb kids.”
That’s the only war story Doug’s ever heard from his dad.
“He doesn’t talk about it,” Doug says. “It’s like pulling teeth.”
I saw Larry Poulin in a line at a funeral last week. He stood sandwiched between John Partridge and some other people. He smiled ‘hello,’ and we talked as he waited to give his respects.
“How are things going at the VFW?” I asked him.
He looked down at the carpet of the funeral home. He looked back up again. Our eyes met. “There aren’t too many of us left.”
He swallowed.
I swallowed.
The line he was standing in moved a couple steps closer to the urn and the widow.
I told Larry about how my stepfather and Doug’s dad never talked about what happened in the war.
“A lot of the guys are like that,” Larry said.
He said they came home and they wanted to focus on the present, on their girls and their freedom. They wanted to focus on the good and leave the war behind.
Larry joined the navy right after he graduated high school. In an article by Stephan Fay that was printed in the Ellsworth American’s series “The Greatest Generation,” Larry said, “I was a scrawny little thing. Five feet short and about 105 pounds.”
They wouldn’t let him in.
He tried again when he was 18, eating pounds of bananas trying to weigh enough to pass the physical. He made it and served for almost 31 months.
We talked a little bit about that while we stood in line. People murmured behind us. Some spoke about their daughter’s dreams of being a writer. Others talked about pension issues. Some hugged each other, shook hands, looked into each other’s eyes, a community of people gathered together in mourning and respect.
While we stood there, Larry mentioned that there was another war, now, more veterans being made. He wondered how it would have turned out differently, if the United States and the Allies had lost World War II.
For just a second, I closed my eyes and though about what Doug’s father saw in Germany, what my step-dad saw in the Pacific, about the things they wouldn’t talk about, the hearts and stars and medals they had hidden away, the stories they kept inside.
“It would be different now,” I said to Larry.
“Yeah?” He gave a little nod. The line moved up a little again.
“Absolutely,” I said.
He ran his hands against the sides of his pants.
“It would be worse,” I told him. “I know it would be worse.”
There are heroes all around us. They shop at Hannaford’s. They stand in funeral lines. They work at the fire station. They drive their cars past us on High Street. They are the people who fought for our freedom.
They are also the people still fighting.
It doesn’t matter how you feel about the causes or the motivations of this current war. The truth is that there are heroes being made all the time.
For the last five years, we’ve been in a war. For the last five years, American fathers and mothers have fought on other continents, leaving their families behind. And their families? They’re the heroes too, living with worry every day, functioning, missing their loved one.