1945
Dear Anza,
All you get for this part is a letter, because usually I can tell good stories but not about this. Not about the War.
Of course I quit my job with Mallory as soon as I turned seventeen to go enroll like all the other stupid young people out there. This time they couldn't turn me down. I was in the last two years or so of World War II and I wished I could have told you more about it, so that I could make the war more than a chapter in those boring history books they make you memorise, but I was just as terrified about the war when you were a kid than I was when I was in Europe.
I was a mechanic. I fixed trucks and tanks, cars and motorcycles and just about anything that needed fixing. Even a plane once –now there's a story I wished I had had the courage to tell! Even a plane…
There are stories I'm telling you now that I wouldn't tell you when I was alive, but stories about the war… some people like to talk. It relieves them. Well I like keeping them inside and digesting the statistics and memories. I can tell you some things in writing though. For example your father? He was named for a friend I had who died. And the two scars I have? One on my hand is from school; the one on my shoulder is shrapnel that hit me while I was fixing a truck in the battlefield.
I'm not sure what lesson this letter's going to give you, Anza. Too many things were learned during that war for me. Things that could have been learned an easier, bloodless way. Well, never mind that. There is no easy way to learn that people are cruel, that your body can push until you die, that you will never stop losing in your life until you stop having things to lose- at which point you're in a state of permanent loss anyways-, that things are fragile, that you're not the hero you wished you were because heroism is freaking hard and not always worth it. Ah, here's one you'll commune with. Not everything can be fixed. That is a hard one to learn for our family, but our family's the kind of family who needs to learn it.
When VE Day came I was as relieved as the next guy to come home.
I went back to working for Mallory full time with another guy, Ross Winchester- who was an ass. Mallory was getting old and he was losing his touch and the flexibility in his limbs- like I am right now. Then Ross Winchester got fired -because as previously discussed he was an ass- and it was just me. I made enough money to help Mabel, who was nearly too old to work, and my siblings running. I made enough money to be happy. I wasn't a prince or anything, but I wasn't a popper which was exactly what most people had thought I was gonna become the minute someone stopped paying for a roof above my head and some food to go in my stomach.
Another lesson. You can get what you want in life. I know that you don't believe that right now, the colour of your skin and the shape of your body is telling everyone not to hire you in the engineering business. And Anza, I don't think that that's fair and you know it, but I've never openly sworn about it, have I? Because that's how it is in my head Anza: swear, swear, swear, why Anza, swear. And every time that rant pops up in my head I let it run for a while because you're my granddaughter and so of course I want the best for you; but it never lasts long, I eventually col it. Because I know that one day you'll get what you want. If the mess of a man that I was back in '45 could, then so can you my beautiful Anza. You can fix that; I'm telling you.
Sammy