He paused and wiped his eyes, then cleared his throat.
“You see, this key, to me, represents the worst of man. We took this key out of a door in the worst place I’ve ever been in the world. We rescued men out of a prisoner camp in Germany. And I still have nightmares about that place. I think this was the best trophy Buzz Company pulled out of the war.”
“Amen,” said Chartelli.
There was another long time of silence. Torgeson stirred.
“Well, I suppose we should keep going,” he said.
He had a felt jewelry box similar to Pops’s. He snapped it open, and with his liver-spotted hands, pulled out some coins, and passed them around. But they weren’t coins. They were medals. Three of them, all inscribed with 1944 Buzz Co. Champ. On the back, I could just make out the event names: Arm Wrestling, Rock Target, and 3-mile run.
“I’ll be damned!” yelled Chartelli. “These were my baby!”
“Ya, too bad you couldn’t win one!” said Torgeson with a chuckle.
“You see, back then, I was always lookin’ for the quick buck,” said Chartelli, looking around the group of people, smug in his newfound audience. “So I created our very own Olympics, and we had three hundred men compete for just nine medals. Well, ten medals. But it was nine events. You see, one of the events had two men—”
“Good Lord,” said Pops. “Sixty-six years later, and you still talk nonstop!”
“Hey, shut up, will ya?” Chartelli said playfully, then told everyone the story of the Olympics, and how Torgeson had won the arm wrestling medal by beating out Stackhouse.
Torgeson told how the platoon decided that he should carry Paul Taylor’s medal. But when he tried to give it to Jackson’s family, he couldn’t find anyone in St. Louis that knew Paul. He figured maybe his family moved away. So he just kept it with the other two. And he told about how he ended up with the Rock Target medal at the French Chateau.
Chartelli looked at Pops. “So, goomba. Which of us is next? I don’t think you’re gonna beat what I brung.”
“Is that right?” asked Pops. “Well, probably not. You probably got Adolf’s mustache in there.”
He looked at Dad. “Can you bring me the tool?” Dad nodded.
Pops wrapped gnarled fingers around the felt box and popped it open. Then he held up something brown. It was leather. Burned in the leather were the letters DMc. It was his letter to Great-Grandma.
He took a couple of minutes to describe how McIntire came up with the letter idea, and how they’d exchanged them in case they got killed. People were wide-eyed. Even though I’d already heard the story, I got a chill when I thought of these young men, my age, writing letters about their deaths.
“When we heard we were heading home, we all gave each others’ letters back. Harry Trumbull had mine. Petey Anderson originally had it, but when he died...” Pops voice quivered a bit and he stopped talking. I looked at the other men. They looked down and frowned.
After a few seconds, Pops shook his head and sniffled. “Well, anyway, Harry gave me back my letter.”
“Harry was a good egg,” nodded Chartelli, then he winked. “But that bastard took a lot of my poker money!”
All four men laughed, and then Pops asked Dad to help him out. First they passed the letter around. The stitching had rotted away—it was just two stiff pieces of leather, sandwiching a pitted square of tin. The solder was still solid. Dad pulled out tinsnips and carefully cut away two sides of the square. He pried the tin open, and extracted a yellow square of paper.
“I wouldn’t think it would age if it was sealed,” said Dad.
“No, that’s what color the paper was when we used it,” said Pops. “You want to read it out loud?”
Dad hesitated. “Pops, maybe you should read it?”
“No, I couldn’t get through it. You’d see me bawling like a baby.” Everyone laughed.
“OK, here goes,” said Dad. He cleared his throat. “Dearest Deborah. If you are reading this, I was killed. I hope I did the best I could. I want you to find a good man and get married, and have a family. Know that I always loved you, and more than anything, I want you to be happy. Love, Doug.”
Again, the group got silent. The men from Buzz Company were deep in thought, silently nodding to themselves. After a few minutes, Chartelli stirred.
“Well, that sure as hell wasn’t very poetic!”
“You think you did any better?” asked Pops.
“Well. Hell no. I bet I spelled everything wrong anyway.”
“How did you fit a letter in that tiny square anyway, as much as you used to talk?” asked Stackhouse.
“What do you mean used to talk?” asked Pops.
“Yeah, you’re a real funny guy,” said Chartelli. “But I’m tellin’ you guys, I got somethin’ here that will blow your doors off.”
“Always with the circus act,” said Torgeson. “I’m glad some things never changed.”
Chartelli opened a brown paper bag, and pulled out a leather wallet. More like a folder. Pops sat higher in his wheelchair, peering at it.
“That isn’t what it looks like, is it?” asked Pops. Pops was leaning forward, stiff and attentive. He was making me nervous and a little scared.
“Prepare to be amazed!” said Chartelli as he opened the folder, and in a flourish, yanked out a flash of pink. He fluffed it up a bit. It was a square of pink silk with white embroidery, torn and stained. Bo Cooper’s magic scarf! Torgeson, Stackhouse, and Pops all gasped.
Pops put his hands to his temples. “How in the world did you get that back?”
“That was easy!” said Chartelli. “When we put this thing in this courier pack, I added some paper with it. One sheet gave the instructions. Another sheet was for a list of the people who used the scarf. And a card included instructions that when the war was over, this was supposed to be sent to my home address. I didn’t want it to just get thrown away. I was going to send it to Bo Cooper as a surprise. Kind of a way of thanking his grandma for us. But I didn’t get it back until 1948. And of course Bo died in Bastogne. So, I didn’t know what to do with it. The damn thing scared the hell out of me, because I didn’t want that bad luck hitting me. I crossed my fingers and figured that since I never used it in combat, and it was for good luck in combat, I was safe with it.”
“What are you talking about?” asked one of the relatives.
All four men started talking about the scarf, taking turns remembering incidents where it appeared the scarf saved them, and they told about Gunderson and how he broke the rules and died. And then they all talked about Stankowski and how Kozlowski had said that Cooper was the toughest guy in the company. They laughed and talked about how skeptical Stankowski had been, but then it tamed him and shut him up.
“You told Pops that combat tamed Stankowski, not the scarf,” I said.
Chartelli nodded. “That’s right, sonny. Your great-grandpappy has one hell of a good memory for being an old fart like us.”
They pulled out the list of people and one of the other men’s relatives read off the names. I recognized a lot of them from Pops’s stories: Petey Anderson, Hillbilly Bert Jackson, John Stankowski, Tony Morelli, Fred Crimmins, Paul Taylor, Tinpan Jones, Sven Torgeson, Charlie Moore, Tim Robertson, Mike Franklin, Gunderson, Howie Dale, Vern Fisher. But there were a lot of names on there I didn’t recognize. In fact, a huge number of names. There were three sheets of paper in the folder—the original one, and then two more. Someone counted the names as they ran them off. Two hundred and twenty-eight. The scarf had passed hands over two hundred times.
“You think this thing really has magic?” asked Torgeson as he stroked it.
“Well, I’d say two hundred and twenty-eight men thought so. More than that I’ll bet. I think everyone in our platoon believed in it,” said Chartelli.
“This thing’s worth at least two stars,” said Torgeson, nodding toward the Wall of Freedom.
“Yeah.” A few moments of silence as everyone stared at the wall
across the memorial.
“So, now what?” asked Pops. “Petey, you got any other surprises for us? Because I’m getting awfully tired.”
“No, Pops,” chuckled Dad. “That was it. Thanks for sharing this day with us.”
There was a moment of awkward silence. None of us knew how to wrap it up. Pops cleared his throat.
“Well, I just want to say thank you to my grandson. And thank you to all of you for coming here with us.” He choked back some tears as he talked. “This has been one of the finest days in my life. It reminded me of some great men and probably the greatest thing I ever did in my life. That and getting married and having a great family.”
The veterans all stood and shook hands, and hugged each other real tight. They all cried. I know what they were thinking. They would never see each other again. People from different families all shook hands and hugged. For that moment, we were all one family—the family of Buzz Company. There wasn’t a dry eye in the group.
As the goodbyes were said, someone handed the scarf back to Chartelli. The families were starting to separate when Chartelli yelled out.
“Now, hold on a minute, I ain’t quite done! Gather around here!”
We all turned, and surrounded him.
“Always with the circus act,” said Torgeson through a smiling sob.
“Hey, Light Bulb,” called Chartelli.
“Yeah, Oily, what is it?” asked Pops.
“Get that big young fella over here. Get that soldier over here,” said Chartelli.
Pops was standing next to me. He looked up at me through tears. Then he looked down and grabbed my hand, and we walked together forward a couple of steps.
Chartelli stood in front of me, looking up at me through those thick glasses.
“So you’re going to war, eh, son?”
I nodded, but didn’t say anything.
“Your great grandpappy told you a lot of our stories, didn’t he?”
I nodded again, and looked at Pops. I put my arm around him and hugged him gently.
“Well then, you need to do me a favor,” said Chartelli. He was talking very loudly.
“Anything you want,” I said.
He looked down, and held up the scarf. “You take this for me. You take this with you into combat. And you use it. Then you share it. You follow the rules. Can you do that?”
I nodded.
“Son, you take the Buzz Company with you, all right? You remember us, and you take us with you. YOU are Buzz Company now.”
I couldn’t talk. I just took the scarf and folder, and nodded as I stared into Chartelli’s eyes. He gave me a stern look, his eyebrows scrunched over his thick glasses. Then his gaze softened, and he winked. “Go get ’em, son,” he whispered. Then he slapped me on the chest, shook my hand, and walked away.
As we left the memorial, Pops pulled me to the side. He grabbed my right hand, and turned it palm up. I saw a glint of metal as he put something in my hand and closed my fingers around it.
“Thanks for being my date today,” he said.
I opened my hand. A bright yellow gold coin, worn smooth from years in his pocket. His lucky ten-dollar gold piece.
“Pops, I can’t take this,” I said.
“Sure you can, sonny. I don’t need it any more. And you are definitely going to need it.”
I fingered the coin. All the words had worn off. I nodded.
“I don’t know how I can thank you.”
“Sonny, you already did. You remember I talked about men having the greatest day of their lives? Well, this one is in the top five.”
I nodded again. “For me too, Pops. This was my Honor Flight too.”
We hugged, and joined the rest of the family. I held back my tears. I knew this would be the last time I would be with this great man. He died about a year later, while I was in Afghanistan. I gave up the scarf during my tour, but I left instructions that it be returned to me after the war, just like Chartelli. I haven’t got it back yet. I hope it’s working. And I still carry that ten-dollar gold piece.
The End
A Letter to the Reader
Thank you for purchasing my debut novel. I hope you enjoyed it. While the story is fresh in your mind, I’d like to ask for a couple of things from you.
The publishing industry is undergoing a dramatic transformation. Thanks to e-readers and easy self-publishing, thousands and thousands of titles are being released all the time. For my story to have a chance of being shared, I need to rely on word of mouth.
So:
1. If you liked the book, tell your friends to buy a copy! This is the single best way to get the word out. With so many titles being released, it’s very difficult to be heard above the traffic.
2. If you liked the book, provide an online review wherever you purchased the book. (Or Goodreads.com if you prefer. Or even better, both!)
3. I’d love to hear from you directly! What was your favorite part? Least favorite? What could have been done better? Any questions for me? I can be reached at:
Website: www.danmccurrigan.com
Email: [email protected]
Best regards,
Dan
My Honor Flight Page 19