A Cook in the Navy. in Whey and Sonic Screwdrivers.

It was always a joke with my grandpa. “I was a cook in the Navy!” A joke, because he didn’t really cook all that much. Grandma always did most of the cooking.

Quietly, she told me that he was also a gunner in the Navy, at times. I never really got the chance to ask him about this.

It just. It makes me wonder. There hasn’t been a significant war in over sixty years. Can you fathom it? Fuck all this “terrorism” bullshit. Can you fathom knowing that the war you’re fighting for actually threatens the livelihood of your nation? That, if you fail, all of your friends and family will have their way of live changed, or maybe they’ll all be killed?

My grandpa was mostly a goofball. I could read that he was trying to be playful with my grandma, but over time, it turned into him being kind of me to her. I forgive him for that.

I just try to imagine. If there was actually a war I believed in. A war that I knew, if we failed, everybody I loved and cared for might die. Fairly good chance that, when I came home, I’d play it off. Far less stressful to say “I was a cook in the Navy” than to acknowledge my place in history.

I never went to his funeral. I felt bad about it, but I just couldn’t. I wanted to remember him as he was, rather than what he had become. The old man who would carry buckets of feed with his pinkie, rather than the frail man who wasn’t who I grew up with.

I don’t know anything about my great-grandparents. But my kids? They’re going to know my grandfather was a hero. They’re going to know he saved the world. That, if he failed, the world we know wouldn’t exist. And after he came home, he was still the same person. Just like you and me. And he’d rather just be a cook in the Navy than ever take any glory for himself.