The Christmas Kid: And Other Brooklyn Stories by Hamill Pete

Author:Hamill, Pete [Hamill, Pete]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780316232777
Goodreads: 15789773
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2012-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

A Hero of the War

BILLY FITZGERALD IDOLIZED HIS father and nobody in the neighborhood could blame him. Paulie Fitzgerald was, after all, a hero of the war. In the bars, in the veterans’ clubs, they all knew the story well: how Paulie had gone to Korea in that first brutal winter of the war, when the ground froze to iron, and how his outfit was cut off in the night and the flanks were overrun, and how Paulie fought off the Communists all by himself, killing eleven of them, until help arrived in the morning. Billy knew the story as well as anyone, although his father was a modest man and didn’t talk about it much, except when he was drinking.

“Let’s just say it was terrible,” his father would say. “War is hell, kid. War is hell.”

But there were medals and ribbons in the top drawer of the bureau in his parents’ bedroom and, in their way, they were enough. Sometimes when nobody was home, when Billy was a boy, he would take them out and examine them. The Bronze Star. The Distinguished Service Medal. The Purple Heart. They thrilled Billy and, handling them, he would imagine his father, young and tough, with a machine gun in his hands, marching across barren hills, and then fighting hard through fear and blood to save his buddies. Sometimes, Billy would wear the medals, pinning them to his chest, as his father did on Memorial Day, when he marched with the other veterans. In some important way, the medals made Billy feel directly connected to that larger, braver world that seemed to exist only in movies.

“I don’t talk about it,” his father said one night, after coming in late from Rattigan’s Bar and Grill, across the street. “But I must have fired three hundred rounds. Cohen got it, and Lloyd, and Charlie Ramirez, and I kept shootin’ and the Commies kept comin’ and I thought the night would never end.”

In 1971, when Billy was eighteen, he felt it was his duty to volunteer for the army. His mother cried and protested, and his younger brothers told him not to do it, but Billy insisted that as the oldest son he had no choice. In his time, his father had done his duty; now it was Billy’s turn.

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