The Ghost Of Christmas Past
for PFC Theodore Nell RIP
Every year at Christmas
my great-uncle Ted drank
himself quietly insensate,
though the rest of the year
he rarely took a drink.
He sat and he drank and
disappeared into memories.
In his mind, he returned
to deep, glacial darkness.
Bastogne, Belgium, 1944.
Coldest winter in
living memory.
Surrounded, outnumbered,
exhausted, and alone,
his Screaming Eagle comrades
stood fast in the frost,
resigned to fight to the death.
As he drank, he heard again
the banshee wail of incoming
German eighty-eights,
the clanking treads
of massed Tiger tanks,
the futile screams
of his wounded friends.
A week and a day of frozen hell.
His 101st Airborne Division
covered itself with glory
and passed into legend,
but some private part
of twenty year old Ted
died on that famous perimeter.
Each Christmas, frigid ghosts
of the fallen called him back.
He remembered the true cost
of Peace On Earth,
and just what horrors
good Christian men
can inflict upon each other.
He was never bitter.
He only did his duty
and tried to return
to the normal life.
But each Christmas,
drink by drink by drink,
he said goodbye once more
to the piece of his soul
he left behind forever
in that ruined village,
to the shivering boy
he could never be again.
When he passed out,
we carried him off to bed
to sleep softly in oblivion
among the living dead,
an old man, gone now,
my late, great-uncle Ted.
I published this story last Christmas. It was well received. I like it because I loved my uncle and wonder how I would have stood up to such an extreme situation. He was a common man called upon to summon up uncommon valor. So I am republishing it, partly to see how it does under the new, limiting Medium algorithm. Happy or Merry Whatever You Choose. mce
