The Soldier's Code My Mother Keeps

By David McGrath
Tuesday, November 11, 2008

"Mom, isn't it time you finally tell us what G-O-G means?"

She sat silent in the armchair in the parlor, holding a stainless steel cane across her knees.

"Please, Mom. What did the letters G-O-G stand for?"

All we knew was that it was the nickname given to her by our father, her husband, Charlie, from their courtship, before their wedding in 1941. We had seen proof in the letters my father wrote during World War II, his swirling, loopy script rendered with fountain pen and green ink.

Dearest GOG . . . can't wait till this war is done,

. . . please, don't be lonely, GOG. Remember Beaverville, and the pasture at sunset?

. . . It won't be long, GOG, till I can cuddle you in my arms . . .

. . . my silky, beautiful GOG.

Hardly a pretty word, GOG. But this was music to our childish ears. It excited us to imagine that our tall, serious, often stern father of eight once upon a time wanted to "cuddle" our "silky" mother in his arms.

The letters were bound with a wide red rubber band and kept in the "war chest," a worn oak toy box housing my father's uniform, his corporal's stripes, a billed officer's cap and various documents, including his release papers.

Also in the war chest, tucked into a faded green shoebox, was a stack of black-and-white photographs. One showed three uniformed soldiers sitting on the hood of a Jeep, smoking cigarettes. Another, two men tossing a football. My favorite was of six soldiers posing with their shirts off, flexing their biceps, a fence and a city park visible behind them. In each picture, we would search for the boy with the dark wavy hair and big nose; we would not otherwise have recognized our dad, whom none of us children had ever known to be so skinny.

Later, when we studied the war in history class, my eyes would race past the text to get to the photographs of somber troops marching over wintry roads; of soiled, anguished men loading antiaircraft guns; of ships at sea, weapons blazing. It was hard to believe it could be the same war my father was in, with all those laughing boys horsing around.

Dear GOG, I love you in every country, in every state, and all the way home. I will telephone you when I get to the train station. Let's hope Baby won't be scared.

Crazy about Gog and Baby --

Charlie

That message, on a yellowing, cracked postcard, needed no explanation for folks of my mother's generation.

Baby was my oldest brother, "Little" Charlie, who lived his first 18 months without having met his father, who was mostly away for nearly five years spanning the war. Baby did end up being scared of the uniformed stranger when he was back in the States on furlough; my mother laughingly recalled his "Go away, Man," imprecation, offered when my father tried to enter the bedroom.

When my mother became pregnant with her second child, she wrote to President Harry Truman, asking if he could please speed things up so that her husband would not miss the birth of his second child.

The White House replied with a polite form letter. Not long after, James was born, my father still absent.

Truman did finally speed things up, dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, accepting the Japanese surrender, and sending antiaircraft artillery specialist Charlie McGrath by ship and rail to the train station on Chicago's South Side.

We had speculated that one of the G's in G-O-G could stand for Gertrude, my mother's name. We'd sit at the kitchen table, ostensibly doing homework, brainstorming to break the code on our loose-leaf pages: Ga-Ga over Gertrude . . . Girlfriend of Glamour . . . Gem of a Girl.

When we were older, we surmised that its meaning might be adult in nature, something that was none of our business. But my father addressed her birthday and Valentine's Day cards, even her Christmas gifts, "With love, to GOG," into his seventies. This seemed to rule out such a notion.

As I reflect on my mother's store of images and recollections, it makes me almost dizzy to think that there were 16 million other men and women who served during World War II, each connected to their own family's mountain of memories. Add to that the tens of thousands of veterans of Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and all the campaigns in between. We owe it to all of them to tell their stories, particularly on Veterans Day.

Today, Gertrude McGrath is 88. Her soldier boy has been dead 15 years.

"It's okay for you to finally tell us what GOG means, don't you think, Mom?" I could see her eyes clearly through her thick glasses, but her face darkened as she shook her head no.

I felt a catch in my throat then, as I realized that as long as only the two of them share the secret, Charlie remains alive in her heart. He was in the room.

I hugged and kissed her goodbye, feeling the tear on her cheek.

Hers, of course.

An English instructor at the University of South Alabama, David McGrath has just completed a memoir about growing up in the Midwest in the 1960s. His email address is dmcgrath@usouthal.edu.