Chloe Picchio

My grandfather wanted to be a soldier but he was too young so his brother Peter helped him. Peter took his birth certificate and smudged the birth date, making my grandfather 18, two years older than he really was. The army accepted the ruse and my grandfather got what he so badly wanted: a one-way ticket out of his dead-end town via the 109th Infantry Regiment of the United States Army. It was 1939 and still peace time. My grandfather thought he had found a way out of hell, an escape from Pennsylvania’s coal fields where the anthracite earth swallowed men whole and set houses ablaze. But then the war came and my grandfather was sent to fight and never quite came back.