Veterans

Got out a foxhole to go the bathroom and a mortar landed in it. He spent two years at what was an Army hospital at The Greenbrier. Well into the 1970’s my grandmother would massage his shoulders from time to time when he got home from the plant. Tiny bits of shrapnel came out fairly regularly.

He was my mother’s stepfather but he was the only grandfather I knew.

My stepfather once asked him why a guy who’d been through that and had a GI Bill at his disposal (he read voluminously) why did he marry a woman with 4 kids.
Johnnie didn’t hesitate, “ because I loved her”