Junto Boys

VETERANS DAY

Here's my grandfather Pvt. Vincent P. (Jack) Stark (right) on the shores of the Philippines in 1943.



He was awarded the purple heart after taking some grenade shrapnel in the leg. He never talked about what happened. The shrapnel would work its way out in the early 1980s. He showed it to me as it broke through his skin. A doctor had to cut it out.












A relative told my mother that the blast knocked him out and he regained consciousness when two Japanese soldiers tried to move him. He somehow killed them both.




















Near the end of his life he told me a story about guarding an airfield that came under Japanese attack. My first inclination was to videotape his story, but I thought it would have made the moment unnatural and decided to have the memory of him telling me over the memory of the exact details.

When I was 8 years old my grandmother shared with me these two photos:

The guys he arrived with:













The guys he left with:


The war was always with him. I remember he had a relapse of Malaria in the 1970s, something he picked up during the war. His doctor in Indiana couldn't treat it and he had to travel to the south to get help.


Jack is 3rd from the left in this picture. Look at how much weight he lost compared to the stocky picture on the top. It was probably the malaria.



The biggest impact of the war was losing his baby brother. "Boots" they called him. He was a tail gunner in Europe shot down during one of those dangerous missions like in the movie Memphis Belle.

My mother has Boots' war bonds in a box. Boots married quickly before shipping out and his wife disappeared after his death forfeiting the bonds. I wonder if she is still alive.

My granfather was at Hiroshima 7 days after the drop. The army was there to help cleanup and restore order. One day he found several rolls of film. Curious to their content he put them away. The Army made him surrender the film when he left Japan, but he palmed one roll and on it was some graphic evidence of the blast. The style suggested it was shot by a photojournalist. He may have been an Army man himself and tried to hide the film from the authorities. We'll never know.

My grandfather died from cancer in 1996. His specialist in Memphis said that he had only seen his type of cancer one time before, the other man had also been at Hiroshima shortly after the war. If his death was related to the radiation, I'm blessed that he lived 50 years after the war.