I was probably 10 or 11 years old when my grandfather talked to me about war.
Other kids my age, the boys in my small-town Ohio neighborhood, spent their summer vacations running from yard to yard dodging imaginary incoming fire, shooting one another with cool plastic Mattel machine guns, lobbing toy hand grenades toward enemy houses.
I learned about war in my grandpa's tool shed, where he sometimes read to me from the diary he kept while he fought in the trenches in France in the First World War. I loved our family visits to the small farm where my grandparents lived. There was a pond where we fished for bass and bluegills, and I hid from my sister in the fields of tall corn. Grandpa's shed held lots of interesting wrenches and saws and everything he needed to keep the tractor running and the barn in good repair. My favorite thing about the shed was grandpa's collection of stuff from his years in the service. There were huge group photos of young soldiers looking clean and confident before being shipped to Europe, and war relics grandpa had brought back from the fighting: a ceremonial helmet and canteen, a military telephone, a spent artillery shell. When grandpa and I were in the tool shed, the canteen and helmet gave me a chance to ask about the war.
The way grandpa told it, war sounded miserable.
The main reality seemed to be mud. Mud and more mud. Mud that bogged down horses, wagons and men alike. Looking back on it now, I don’t remember hearing about killing, or about my grandpa losing buddies, though I now know the war claimed 126,000 American lives (and 1.5 million French, 2 million Russians and 2 million Germans.) My guess is that I was hearing diary passages acceptable for a 10-year-old, but I understood that war is not a game.
Still, I wanted to do what my friends were doing. I nailed some small pieces of wood together and fashioned myself a machine gun. I played at war with the kids in the neighborhood, but my heart was never in it.
When I was 16, I got my first real camera and set up a darkroom in a closet of my parents’ house. My grandfather was aging but he and I still spent a lot of time together. I helped him around his farm. Occasionally I took my camera out to the tool shed and shot a few photos. I knew my time with grandpa would not last forever. Something told me that the camera might one day help me remember.
My grandpa still read his war diary, but now he read silently, and to himself. I was happy just being there with him.
