Remembering Stubby - November 11th by D. Grant DeMan
Each November 11th I remember my old buddy Stubby, first and foremost. Yep, I also feel gratitude to the millions who sacrificed their lives to war for our freedom: Uncle Sim who went out to "clean up Europe" in 1917; my cousins who flew countless missions over Nazi Germany, and those who fought the Japanese empire from aircraft carriers; my old pal Doug who, recuperating at home from his Korean wounds, can be forgiven for chasing an Oriental vegetable vender in a drug-induced hallucination that put his mind right back in harm's way overseas. The timid sailors at Pusser's corners out for the first time displaying their raw, ugly facial skin grafts over the bone-deep searing burns of Korean fire. Big Ken Barwise - six- seven with hands like dog-baskets - who they say wiped out nine Red Chinese machine-gun nests in one day.
God rest them all, and families who endured grating loss and disruption. Our eternal thanks.
But the recollection of Stubby, just a regular boot soldier, touches me more. For it was Wilson Conrad Stubblefield we used to watch daily, trenchcoat collar turned up against a scrawny neck, forlornly going to and from his mother's home on Victoria's Chambers Street, talking to himself as if lost in an incomprehensive maze. Though only fifteen at the time I became his friend. I remember asking Stubby about his war service, and he told me he was on the first wave in Normandy.
"What did you do over there?" I asked, hoping for some heroic war story.
"Mostly I kept my head down and prayed a whole lot," he replied.
One day he beckoned, "Do you want to meet a real war hero? You'll have to have a strong stomach."
He took me up to a veteran's hospital where we saw a scarred old fellow, whose name I cannot recall, skin corroded, submerged in a tub of oily liquid, a victim of World War I mustard gas.
"And some folks think war is glory," commented Stubby later, "I feel damn guilty for coming back in one piece."
There was no secret as to his drinking for he perpetually kept a bottle of Captain Morgan's Rum in that trenchcoat pocket, and went down in Lover's Field drinking with Charlie, a war photographer who had returned to find his wife in the arms of another, ultimately living out his short life on Warf Street's Hell Road. Sometimes we'd meet little "Sippasteam" Jimmy Carlin and Johnny Stone who brought wine from work which we'd drink in a greasy Atlas Cafe alley, and there I heard first hand about the body parts that went missing, the loss, the twisted humanly unendurable anguish. And more.
Strafing Messerschmitt 109's, their 20 and 30 millimeter cannon blasting flesh into rock and soil, buddies' blood and pulverized brains you spat out while blindly returning fire. A cloying smoky putrid smell and taste of death that never left you. Dry-mouth fear of incoming fire, Wermacht 88's on body grinding Panzers. The chilling rattle of flesh-ripping machine guns, and ordinance jammed up just when you needed it most, defective equipment and officers whose resolve melted in the steely enemy's face, the torso -wrenching sobbing, loneliness that stole your soul upon that realization in the icy-cold loneliness of night that your closest friends were forever Valhalla gone. The eardrum crushing noise that rang and rang and thundered until you screamed and even when you came home it never stopped. And you didn't tell anyone because how could they understand? They held parades, didn't they? They put up monuments. They gave you medals.
So guys like him stumbled around town going in and out of pool halls, card gaming clubs, upstairs' cafes, and whorehouses, singing profane war songs, and remembering; while futilely trying not to.
Stubby celebrated 1953 by acquiring a powder blue Chevy, and I enlisted in the RCAF. He told me I was crazy, but with a kind of expression that said he was proud, though delighted when that Asian conflict halted, I ceased training and returned. One day in 1957 he gave me a downtown rum party at the CAC Gardens because I was leaving for police work in Ontario, and promised to write.
A letter came. For the first time Stubby sounded excited for he was about to be married and move to, of all places, Ontario. While I waited for him I received a clipping. Stubby and his bride had been killed some weeks before in an Ontario automobile crash not far from me.
No. Wilson Stubblefield did not die a war hero. As men go he was just a regular shmo. But I loved the guy, and recalling that the instant he'd finally had one taste of happiness he met his maker ...well?
Well.
There'll be laying no poppies, nor wailing Amazing Grace bagpipes over Stubbie's wind-swept resting place this day. But at least one guy knows Stubby did his duty, and suffered for it.
And God. I reckon He knows Stubby too.