WHEN ‘OLDEN DAYS’ GET OLDER

My olden days started in 5th grade.

It was a nice day in North Bend, Oregon.

A little chilly, not that foggy, and just windy enough to spread your jacket out like wings and lean in to it.

I skipped half the lunch recess outside and ducked into the grade school library.

The door was unlocked.

Until then I’d only been inside during regular class tours.

Now I had it all to myself.

My grim memory is opening a WWII picture book.

I grew up playing army in my dad’s old green jacket. He had a few of them.

The library book showed pictures of the same jackets on Marines in WWII and Korea.

He wore his in Korea.

His kids wore them while they ambushed each other in the woods around their house.

I left the library after a bruising view of man’s inhumanity to his fellow man.

I wanted to know more.

But where to start? My dad’s sock drawer.

I found a small case of medals including a Purple Heart and a Silver Star.

Because my parents valued education, we had a bookcase of an entire encyclopedia set and a forty pound dictionary in the house.

I looked up Purple Heart and Silver Star to find out my dad was a warrior?

One of those?

He was just a dad, but . . . ?

Now he was a warrior from olden days of early 1950’s I knew nothing about?

My ten year old brain started ticking.

Olden Day Warrior

My latest binge has been The Last Kingdom, a gore-fest of Heathen Danes vs Christian Anglo-Saxons.

Viking Raiders vs English Kingdoms.

It follows clash after clash with characters outliving their probable livespans.

To understand the drama, the captured hero won’t give up important information. He’s taken to a dungeon and severely beaten.

Death blow roundhouses to the head and body while chained upright.

He doesn’t break and gets thrown into a cell where he’s visited by the king. We see his smashed face eye slits and busted lips.

It was an awful beating for what amounted to a misunderstanding and the king released him.

Our hero stands up, walks out on his own, and two days later all healed up except a bump on his forehead to keep it real.

How real?

English philosopher Thomas Hobbes argued that humans who lived in a state of nature had lives that were “nasty, brutish and short.” And when they look back on the earliest days of humanity, most scholars tend to agree. As Kate Wong, a senior editor of Scientific American, once wrote: “For most of human evolution, our ancestors mostly lived fast and died young.”

My dad’s citation fits the picture from the Dark Ages.

Olden Days From 860 to 1951 to 2023

Humans who lived in a state of nature didn’t have small arms, automatic weapons and mortars.

Once they had weapons and beliefs and families and land, they had something to defend, and the means.

Back then, as now, and as it was on 11 September 1951, warriors answered the call.

I asked my dad how he did what he did in the war.

“Because I was young and stupid.”

Participating in the attack against heavily defended enemy hill positions when his squad was subjected to sudden and intense hostile small arms, automatic weapons and mortar fire, inflicting several casualties, including the squad leader who had to be evacuated at once, Corporal Gillespie bravely moved from man to man through the fire-swept area to assume command of the unit.

Reorganizing the squad, he skillfully led an assault to overrun the first objective and, after evacuating several wounded men, directed a final devastating attack to completely rout the enemy. 

As suspected, I’ve got a different view.

It’s not young and stupid, or olden days stupid, to bond with the people around you.

A shared sense of self defines you as much as anything.

Being part of a team under stress as a regular part of life gives a strong reflection to others.

If doing impossible things with timeless grace and elegance is the goal, who brings it from olden days?

Nominations are now open.