Issue #4: Grandaddy Ellis Covey

I thought a lot about my Grandaddy Ellis Covey when I wrote about Josh Bressel and his tour of duty in Iraq. Like Bressel, Grandaddy was a cadet at Virginia Tech when he volunteered for World War II in 1941. Unlike Bressel, he never returned to finish the degree he was pursuing in agriculture. He found a job at the Radford Army Ammunition Plant that he kept until he was 65. I should say he always seemed as content as any man, with a loving wife and three children.

He would tell war stories to me, and they always involved the pleasant times. Like when his division was stationed in the UK and how he boarded with a nice British couple. He would sometimes say how German prisoners weren't so bad after all. Much better than the Russians he met up with in Berlin, who he described as dirty men.

What he left out, and also what I'd most like to ask him about as a kid, were the battles, the beachheads, the concentration camps, the true horrors of the war that he had witnessed. As a member of the First Infantry division, he had seen a lot by age 21. Maybe this was why he spoke of only the fond memories.

But that doesn't mean he didn't think about those bad times overseas. Hell, a whole generation of men had the same stories and who cares to rehash such things. This was the age of the quiet man; strong and silent like Gary Cooper in the Westerns. WWII veterans often drank and smoked too much, and some of that had to be a way of displacing painful memories.

This leads me back to the veterans of our generation. Bressel was honest, giving, and emotional while telling me his stories. Confidant and loose, as if he were dealing with what he had been through in the best way he could. I'm afraid there are many more who aren't making a smooth changeover to life stateside. Bressel related stories to me of how he and fellow veterans have found themselves driving erratically, fearing overpasses and being suspicious of piles of garbage on the side of the road. Post- Traumatic-Stress-Disorder takes shape in many forms. It can begin with the story Josh told me of a celebration at Fort Lewis for the members of his company who had just returned. When a loud report of gunfire rang out on an adjacent drillfield, everyone hit the deck and reached for their weapons, only to rise up sheepishly at the realization.

These are our veterans, and they are ours to pick up off the ground, dust off, and show that it is ok. That they made it, and the hard part is over. Long after the politicians play them for all they are worth, they will remain. Let ours be the generation that uses our advances in treatment and care that saves a soldier's life on the battlefield, give a young veteran's mind peace on the homefront.

Hart Fowler

Editor in Chief 16 Blocks Magazine