By Tim Gruver
Winter 2016 Kaplan Award Winner
Red, white, and blue were the colors that greeted me when I arrived at the front door of my grandparents’ house one hot day in June as the American flag blew in the breeze overhead. A six hour plane flight and a half-hour drive across Ohio’s endless acres of corn later had brought me and my father to their little cul-de-sac for three days and three nights of no internet and no cell phones. “Wifi, I miss you already,” I thought to myself.
My father and I had just begun our first day in Germantown, Ohio, which would largely be spent in the Veterans’ Memorial Museum to which my grandfather supplied no small number of artifacts. The place smelled of day-old coffee and cigarettes with a faint scent of air freshener. The building amounted to little more than a two-story shack on the outside – its quaint Romanesque architecture indicative of when it had served as the town’s Masonic temple. On the inside, it was a mausoleum of uniforms and stories that a few old war buddies had thought deserved telling.
I was eighteen years old and had just begun the first semester of my college career. I knew what I wanted to do, and that was writing. I wrote about anything, but rarely about myself, if I could help it. Words never seemed to come easily for these gentlemen either when it meant talking about themselves. They spoke with an unrivaled passion, however, when it came to discussing the history they helped to make around them.
My grandfather, Sergeant Kenneth Gruver, was seventeen when he went to fight World War II and the Korean War almost a decade later on the front lines of the 38th Parallel. It was just a year into the latter that he would be wounded at the Busan Perimeter near where I would be born, earning him his second Purple Heart and a trip back home to my grandmother. College never seemed so easy compared to running alongside a tank. It was a comparison I would never bring up aloud at the dinner table all three days of our trip even after I was handed two of my grandfather’s rank bars to keep.
“The first casualty when war comes is truth,” Hiram Warren Johnson allegedly said. That’s exactly what these men wanted to defend – at least as much as authenticity. When my father and I entered what amounted to a lobby, we found ourselves walking down the board ramp of a marine landing craft. If storming the beaches of Normandy was the idea its creators had wanted to bring to mind, it succeeded in digging up my best memories of “Saving Private Ryan.” That, and the swastika glaring back at me from across the room.
The word “swastika” is derived from the Sanskrit “su” meaning “well” and “asti” meaning “being.” I imagine the irony was not lost on Adolf Hitler when it was adopted by the Nazis nor on the veterans who hung it across from the stars and stripes. Here was the flag of the master race in its rightful place: right next to the restroom. I don’t care much about the power of symbols, but I found it hard not to think of the scene as fate. The year was 2012, but today I was staring at the flag of the Third Reich, just a thousand years shy of its intended service.
Its four crooked corners chased one another from left to right like the spokes of a wheel frozen in motion. The flag, as I was told, once flew over the castle of Heinrich Himmler, a chief ally to Hitler, before its dramatic capture on D-Day. It was “a terrible and wonderful time to alive” our tour guide – a guy I remember being named Chuck – remarked. A former CIA agent, he was living off a pension and ran the museum as something of a hobby in his sunset years, his son proudly headed back to Afghanistan the next week. Time marches on to its next battlefield.
I was three months old when I was adopted and immigrated to the United States. I have no memories of Korea nor do I remember a time when it was neither north or south. The appeal of kimchi and K-pop escapes me. I don’t even play Starcraft. I am, for all practical purposes, Korean-American, though I’ve never known of what importance the distinction should carry. Being adopted never meant much to me – it never defined my childhood or my sense of belonging. The mother and father were, in effect, my parents in every way a child could conceive. It’s not a subject that I pay much thought to or one I imagine would make the next great American novel. There are few days that I feel like my Asian is showing, for lack of a better term. This is one of those days.
The posters of bucktoothed Japanese clutching the world in their hands that lined the museum’s northernmost wall reminded me just how foreign the Far East was for America’s “Greatest Generation.” “Jap trap,” one said, depicting that of an Asian-faced rat caught in a mouse trap. “Let’s blast ‘em Japanazis!” another exclaimed. “Um, no offense or anything,” one of our group members, a man named Bob, said to me as we walked by the series of creepy caricatures. I simply smirked and moved on to look at some German gunnery.
At the center of the museum’s top floor stood a makeshift altar draped in a white linen with a single wine glass holding a rose. An empty chair was pulled in front of it. The color white, I recall, represented death and the rose, sacrifice. The chair was for the veteran who had passed My grandfather sat lost in thought for a moment – his mind somewhere before I was born.
My grandparents’ home was a museum itself when we eventually came home. A rack of muskets over their frontier-era fireplace stole my attention as I walked through a living room full of my grandmother’s rustic antiques and my grandfather’s arsenal of bygone firepower. The two go about their business – my grandfather retreats to his lair in the garage and my grandmother is asleep in her easy chair. Her hair is a snowy white now and she shakes so much more than before. She stands up without her cane and tells my grandfather that they need to take my father and uncle to school or they’ll be late for track and field. My father gently sits her back down and tells her there’s nothing to worry about. She obliged and went back to her dreams.
The man looking back at me on my grandfather’s desk looks so much like a thirty-something version of my uncle. He’s sporting a well-groomed mustache looking like the day he did when my father was born or so I’d like to imagine. My grandmother’s tiny dress hangs next to his picture. Kenneth and Barbara Gruver – or the original Ken and Barbie, as my father always said – were more or less the people I remembered from my childhood. Now I knew why they had never sold this old place of theirs with a football field of grass they could barely mow. This was a time capsule that they just couldn’t sell.
“Preserve our history” were the words etched into the placard that hung beneath the museum’s front desk. I thought these words over on the long plane ride home from what would likely be the last time I would see my grandparents together again. It was Douglas MacArthur who told me that, “old soldiers never die; they just fade away.” And they never seem to forget.