title

My Mother was the youngest in a family of nine children. The first child, a boy, died shortly after his birth. In this family there were three girls and five boys who lived to adulthood. Born just before my Mother were twin boys. They were always called “the Twins”. I didn’t realize that they had names until I was about 5 years old. I never knew one of the twins because he was killed in the Korean War but there were pictures of him and his brother in uniform on the wall in the living room. These pictures were my Granny’s prize possessions. The pictures were always there until my Granny died.

Both my Uncles were in the Army during the Korean War. Eugene, the oldest by five minutes, and Hal looked very handsome in their pictures. They looked almost just alike except Hal, the one who was lost, looked angelic while Gene looked angry. My Mother always said that Gene had been angry since Hal was killed.

Gene and Hal had always been very close and had done almost everything together. When they were grown, they had both moved from Arkansas to Illinois to find work in the factories there. They had both gone to work for Caterpillar and were making good money, enough to send their Mother a little every week. Hal was the more settled of the twins. He had met a beautiful girl and was planning to marry her as soon as his tour of duty was up. Gene was more of a partier. He had not settled on a wife or even a serious girlfriend. He liked fast cars and, instead of saving his money like Hal, he bought the fastest and best car he could afford.

They had both been drafted into the Army on the same day. The twins had gone to boot camp together and were shipped out to Korea at the same time, but they were sent to different camps once they arrived. This was the first time in their lives that they had been separated. Gene worked damn hard to get a transfer to be with Hal. It took him months, but his transfer finally came through and he wrote his Mother that he was on his way to Hal’s camp on the DMZ. He was going to surprise Hal upon his arrival. He arrived on July 3, 1950.

Hal wasn’t a hero other than he was a soldier like many others through the years that fought where ever and when ever the Army said he needed to fight. At 22, he was alone in the middle of a war thousands of miles away from his home. According to his commanding officer, he did want he was told and he was a good soldier. When the attack came, he fought just like everyone else who was there, he just wasn’t as lucky as some. Hal was hit in the leg by flying debris from a grenade. The artery in his leg was severed and he had bleed to death before the medics could get to him. He died on July 3, 1950.

Gene was devastated when he learned that Hal had been killed just hours before he arrived at camp. For the rest of his life, he believed that, if he had gotten there a day sooner, just a few hours sooner, he could have been able to protected Hal, save his somehow, or maybe he would have been the one who was killed by the flying metal. Gene brought Hal’s body home to Arkansas and stayed by it the entire time it lay in state at the funeral home. He stood at attention by the coffin all during the funeral service and left only after the grave had been covered. Then he returned to Korea to avenge Hal’s death.

My Granny said that Gene was never the same man he had been when Hal was alive. Gene became an angry man, untrusting of anyone, and just out right mean. I remember that he would come to visit when I was very young and he would stare at the pictures on Granny’s wall. I asked him one time about Hal and he became very angry with me. My Mother told me to never ask again. Gene always scared me. He seemed like he would explode, even in happy times, at any minute; like there was anger rippling just below the surface. Survivor’s guilt stayed with him and he never recovered from the loss of his brother. In a way, I believe that Gene was lost the same day that Hal was.