Between Memory and Time

Derek Olsen

With Veteran’s Day approaching, and war having endured for nearly five years, I’d like to talk for a minute about a man I’ve never met.

Now, he’s not a complete stranger - in fact, he’s family — but I’ve never met him, only some whose lives he touched, and who in turn have touched mine — chief among them, his brother, a man whom I consider as profound an influence on my character as my own grandfather.

This man I’ve never met was a gunner in World War II. He and his division flew bombing missions against the Japanese rail system in China.

Sgt. Anthony J. DeFusco

As I hear it, the family received news regularly for a while. At one point, he was injured on a mission, for which he earned the Purple Heart. Of this, the family recieved news. Shortly after returning to his division, with his Purple Heart, the family stopped receiving news.

I’ve never met this man, now a close relative by marriage, because he was one of the multitudes who do not come home — at all. It’s the silent human cost behind all war: those not counted as injured; not factored into the daily death tolls; those whose whereabouts and final resting places remain unknown for years, or for a lifetime.

Not knowing what’s become of a loved one is, to say the least, impactful. I’ve seen evidence of the mark it left on the man I know so well. You move on, you have to... or maybe, only most of you does.

What’s left behind perhaps lingers, between memory and time, alternately imagining comforting, then disquieting epilogues.

The sooner the Iraq War ends, and American forces are returned home, the smaller the amount of families who will face this terrible uncertainty. And the smaller the number of columnists who will write about men, who are family, whom they’ve never met.