Veterans’ Day

All day I’ve enjoyed the pictures on Facebook—“my father,” “my grandfather,” “my uncle.” All of them look far too young to leave home, let alone to go to fight a war in far lands. And yet they did. I wish I had pictures. I can see them in my mind’s eye, and I think they are probably in the attic somewhere, but I have none in digitalized form. So all I can do is tell you about two servicemen, both of whom fought in World War I.

My father, Richard Norman MacBain, then a Canadian citizen, fought with the British Army; my brother’ father, Richard Russell Peckham, fought for this country. Later, they would be roommates at the Chicago College of Osteopathy. My dad came home with few scars but some embedded fears—the whistle of jet airplanes when they were new would cause him to flinch and head for the nearest building if he was outdoors; he had been gassed (mustard gas) and was ever after subject to bronchial problems. He never ever that I remember talked about the war, and yet from what I read it was horrific. Men in foxholes who were never warm nor dry for months at a time. War then was no less brutal—it was just different than today.

Russell Peckham came home with shrapnel lodged in his jaw. I’m not sure I have the story straight, but I think it was considered too risky to remove it. So he lived with it, and in 1932 fathered a son, my brother, John Russell Peckham. But in 1934 the shrapnel caused an infection and Russell Peckham died. If I got the story straight from Mom, it was only a few years later that penicillin came into use and could have saved his life. (To tell the rest of the story, Mom married my father in 1936, and I was born in 1938.)

Russell’s son, my brother, John served in the U.S. Navy in the 1950s, as a pilot. It was just after the Korean War, and though he flew patrol planes, he never saw active combat as did both his father and stepfather. Russell’s grandson, Russell MacBain Peckham, served in the U.S. Army during the Iran conflict and, like both his forebears, is an osteopathic physician.

In honor of those men, and because I think it’s appropriate and we can never hear it too often, here is the text of the iconic WWI poem, “Flanders Field” by John McRae:

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.