An Immortal Farewell From a Doughboy

Shocked, I sat bolt upright as a familiar face emerged from the 75-year-old images flickering across the screen in my classroom. “That’s Grandpa!” I thought, but the face vanished, replaced by other anonymous doughboys sailing off to France to face the Hun. I ran the film again after the students had left. And there he was. The angular face, the mischievous eyes, the cocksure pose and the unruly shock of hair (red then, they say, but in my memory, only gray), all seemed achingly familiar. But was it my grandfather? I ran the 3-second segment of the young man at the ship’s rail again and again. He was looking directly at the camera, waving goodbye with his cap, a devil-may-care grin announcing his anticipation of foreign adventure. The features and the jaunty attitude seemed right, yet I couldn’t be sure.

Feeling like a character in the movie “Blowup,” I took the film to a light table and looked at each frame with a magnifying glass. But, as with a mounted butterfly, the spirit and vitality that animated the image had evaporated. The cap became a blurred smudge and the face of the newly minted doughboy dissolved into sepia clumps. These frozen moments of a young man’s long vanished life remained enigmatic.

There in the darkness I remembered childhood days spent wearing a gas mask that my grandfather had brought back from France. Later, I hear stories about “the girls in Paris”--tales told with great relish and punctuated with my grandmother’s efforts to shush him. “Now Clyde,” she would say, “You talk like a sausage.” He never stopped talking about the war, though, and as he lay dying of cancer, those days of youth and battle and compliant girls returned to him with a vigor that denied the disease that was killing him. But, 64 years after returning from France, my grandfather was gradually and inexorably losing his battle. A man who had seen comrades die at Chateau-Thierry and come back home to survive the Depression, send loved ones off to a second Great War and watch ghostly images of a man walking on the moon, was getting ready to die.

I stayed with him until the end, and before he drifted away to join those fallen comrades he spoke again about the good times in France. But then he murmured, “Ah Tony, the boys who didn’t come back, boys, just boys.”

I thought of those words and my grandfather’s dying as I threaded the film into the projector for a final look at a lost world and time. The images danced again and, smiling, I was sure. The grinning soldier was Grandpa, Clyde Porter, alive, young, and in a way, immortal. He looked me straight in the eyes across the years. And waved goodbye to me.