My maternal grandfather, Mike Boiko, was a bona fide war hero (World War I). He was awarded the Silver Star, the Purple Heart, the Bronze Star, the Croix de Guerre with Palm, and several other medals since lost when my father (then a teacher) took them to school to show one of his classes and they disappeared from his briefcase. Among the medals lost was my grandfather’s Distinguished Service Cross. The citation preserved at Arlington National Cemetery where he is buried reads as follows: When the advance of his company was temporarily halted by machine-gun fire from an enemy nest, Sergeant Boiko volunteered to flank the nest and put the guns out of action. Although under intense fire, Sergeant Boiko, utterly disregarding his own personal danger, crawled out from the lines and worked his way to a favorable position where enfilade fire could be delivered and with his pistol silenced the guns, capturing them and a portion of the enemy gun crews, thus enabling his company to make a further advance.

Mike wasn’t his real name. His real name was ЕВГЄНИЙ (pronounced Yev-gen-yay) only when he reached the shores of America from his native Kiev, the processing clerk had trouble getting his mouth around my grandfather’s first name. So he became “Mike”. Behind closed doors, my grandmother hinted at some dark secret such as a duel or murder (righteous, no doubt) that forced my grandfather to flee from his beloved Tsarist Russia. While playing in my grandmother’s attic, I discovered a trunk that contained my grandfather’s old uniform, his old gas mask (which I remember putting on and tasting the brittle dustiness of the snorkel-like mouthpiece), the plates of a banned book describing the excesses of the Russian Orthodox Church, his military citations and several letters from the Lenin/Trotsky Communist government asking him to return to Mother Russia to take his place as a hero of the Revolution.

I was only 7 or 8 at the time and none of these things made any sense to me. I never knew my grandfather. He died 13 years before I was born. He came to America sometime around 1911 or 1912. The Russian Revolution wasn’t until 1917. So what could the Communist government have wanted him for? Years later, I began to wonder what would have happened if he had gone back? Would he have survived the Stalinist Purges? Would my grandmother? Would my mother? Would any portion of “me” have survived? The truth is: had he gone back, there would have been no “me”. My mother would have been born in the Soviet Union and not Waterbury, Connecticut. She would never have met or married my Maryland Eastern Shore father and who’s to say that any portion of what would have been “me” would have survived Stalin’s mass murder in the Ukraine or Hitler’s devastation in World War II?

But Mike was as White a Russian as you could find. He despised anything “red”. He wouldn’t even allow that color in his house. (Many years after he died, my grandmother had the whole house covered in red siding. To this day, I wonder if she were making some kind of political statement or just thumbing her nose at her dead husband?)
My grandfather suffered from what we now know as Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. It drove him to drink. From what I’ve heard, he wasn’t a mean drunk. He was just a drunk. He was one of those men who find themselves so much alive when their lives are in danger that peace is not an option for them. Like Sherlock Holmes’ 7% solution, my grandfather needed to anesthetize himself from the lack of physical danger. Sometimes, when he reached a certain level of flushness, he and a couple of his old buddies would hop the trolley to New Haven in order to catch the train to New York City. His goal was the French Consulate. It seems he had a standing invitation from the French Foreign Legion to enlist at an officer’s rank as a reward for the services and honors he had already won in the trenches on the Muse, the Argonne and at Verdun. However, he never made it further than Ansonia. Apparently, he would announce with a great flourish to anyone who was listening that he was off to join the French Foreign Legion. Right after he left, one of his other friends would call my grandmother and she would call the police in Ansonia and they would board the trolley and give Mike and the boys a ride back to Waterbury.

I have often questioned my grandfather’s sincerity about joining the French Foreign Legion. Why would he have taken the trolley when he could have taken the train? Waterbury, CT had (and still does) a beautiful and distinctive train station. Built in 1909, the building was designed by McKim, Meade & White, renown architects from New York City. Its focal point was a Seth Thomas clock tower modeled after the 14th century Torre del Mangia in Sienna, Italy. As many a 66 passenger trains a day serviced Waterbury and, from all reports, the ride to New York City was rather enjoyable. If Mike really wanted to join the French Foreign Legion, the train would have been the fastest and safest way to go. But did he really want to?

Was he bluffing when he got tanked up and announced to one and all that he was off to join the French Foreign Legion? The train was quick and direct… Waterbury to Bridgeport to New York City. The trolley was slow and stopped in every town along the Naugatuck river, plenty of time for my grandmother to make a couple of phone calls. It was easier to be taken off the trolley than it was the train. Was he counting on her “interference”? From all the photographs I’ve seen, Mike would have looked very dashing wearing le kepi blanc.

However, in all the stories I heard about my grandfather, there was always something of the “bluff” about the man. Mike bluffed his way to his Distinguished Service Cross. He used the old BEAU GESTE trick. When working his way to enfilade the German machine-gun nest, he out flanked the enemy by using his own dead. He spread them around and positioned them with their rifles to make it look like they were aiming at the enemy. Then he moved back and forth behind the dead men, firing at the Germans. When the Germans looked up, they thought they had been outflanked and ambushed by a squad of men. They surrendered and the rest is history… well almost.

I said before that Mike used the “old BEAU GESTE trick”. Only, at the time, it wasn’t old. In fact, it hadn’t been thought up, yet. P.C. Wren wrote BEAU GESTE in 1924. In it, as the Arabs are attacking the fort, Sgt. Markov comes up with the idea of propping the corpses of his men at their posts with their rifles to convince the Arabs that the fort is still manned. Six years EARLIER my grandfather had actually used the dead to convince the Germans to surrender.

In 1918, Wren was supposed to be kicking around Morocco and Algeria. Who knows whether or not in those six years he heard the story of the soldier who got a machine-gun nest to surrender by using the dead bodies as his support troops? It would be fun to think while watching the old Gary Cooper movie that Brian Donlevy is actually performing the feat that was inspired by my grandfather.

And who’s to say that he wasn’t. P.C. Wren had a mad “Russian” Sergeant perform a trick to fool the enemy that a desperate Russian (Ukrainian) Sergeant used to fool the enemy in real life.
Even back then, people knew that Mike’s behavior had something to do with the War. My mother and grandmother used to say that my grandfather acted the way he did because he had been gassed.

According to them, Mike would periodically check himself into the VA hospital to dry out. But every time he dried out, he’d get wet again. Eventually his drinking would make him suicidal. Not that he ever attempted to kill himself, he would just get drunk and threaten to. I suppose my mother and grandmother were enablers in their own ways. They allowed or inadvertently encouraged his actions. But even enablers get tired, and the problem with bluffing is that, eventually, someone always calls your bluff.

One afternoon in 1936, Mike was drunk and morose. My mother, who was 13 at the time, walked by him. She was dressed to go out. “Where are you going?” Mike asked. “To the movies,” she answered. She was never clear on what was said, only that Mike didn’t want her to go and she didn’t want to stay because he was drunk. Eventually, he played his trump card. “If you go, I’ll kill myself.” Every other time, she had taken off her coat and stayed. But not that day. “No. You’re drunk,” she said. And she went to the movies.

I’ve often wondered what movie she went to see. 1935/36 was a great year for films. You had Clark Gable in MUTNEY ON THE BOUNTY; Errol Flynn in CAPTAIN BLOOD; Fred Astair and Ginger Rogers in TOP HAT; William Powell and Myrna Loy in AFTER THE THIN MAN; and Janette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy in ROSE MARIE, just to name a few. But it was not the kind of question I could ask. Mom went to the movies. My grandmother was probably in the store. (She ran a little grocery store during the Depression and, by the time of my birth, a liquor store at the same location.)

Being ignored by the two women who meant the most to him, Mike walked across the street to sit and be morose with Mr. Greenberg. But Mr. Greenberg wasn’t the enabler that Mike’s two women were and he had had just about all he could stand from this old war hero.

Whenever I think of my grandfather, I also think of Bruce Springsteen’s song “GLORY DAYS”. How often can you hear the same old stories or bask in the aging sun of youthful heroics? For Mr. Greenberg, it was this far and no farther. At some point in my grandfather’s mantra about killing himself, Mr. Greenberg finally snapped. “Well, stop talking about it and do it or just shut up and get on with your life.” At that point, Mr. Greenberg reached under the sink and pulled out a bottle of bleach and slammed it down on the table in front of Mike.

When I was 18, I was invited to Spain by José Greco, the world famous Flamenco dancer. José introduced me to Andres Vasquez, one of the country’s top matadors. (The next year he would be featured in James A. Michener’s book, IBERIA.) Andres often talked to me about the mystique of bull fighting. “When you do it right,” he said, “you can feel the Angel of Death’s wings enfold you and the bull.
Everything else disappears. It’s just you and the bull and the Angel suspended in time and space.” At St. Michel, Chateau Thierry and the 2nd Battle of the Marne, Mike must have heard the Angel of Death’s wings flapping like a veritable gaggle of geese as the men he knew were blown apart and mowed down around him. For a man who had charged over ground that was more human flesh than dirt, what was a bottle of bleach?
His bluff called, Mike drank it. It took him five days to die.

My mother learned that her father was in the hospital while she was walking home from the movie. The bus driver on the Long Hill run saw her and stopped the bus to tell her. I often wondered how she felt. Was Fred Astair or Errol Flynn worth it? What if she had stayed home? Or would that have just been postponing the inevitable? No one knew how to handle Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder back then, and my grandfather’s self-medication turned out to be as destructive as any German machine-gun nest on the Marne. What if she had stayed home? What if my grandfather hadn’t drunk to death? What if I had gotten to know him? Would my life have been any different? Would knowing him as opposed to knowing about him have helped me in any way? Since Mr. Greenberg didn’t force the bleach down Mike’s throat, and since my mother and grandmother didn’t press the issue, the police ruled it a suicide.

My mother waited until I was 20-years old before she told me the whole story about my grandfather’s death. The next year, Mr. Greenberg was killed walking home from the grocery store. He was frail and in his 90s. It was winter and night and the Long Hill Bus was struggling to make it up the hill. The bus driver figured that the old man must have slipped on the ice in the dark and slid into the vehicle’s path. Since no one saw it happen, the police ruled it an accident.

For the most part, not knowing my grandfather on my mother’s side never bothered me. My grandfather on my father’s side died when I was so young that I barely remember him. What I do remember is a Norman Rockwell-like individual, slender with salt and pepper closed cropped hair (more salt that pepper). In my memory, he is standing… immobile like an old photograph. Perhaps I am remembering a photograph. I also remember crying when I heard he died.

(If you liked this post, you might also like my SciFi/Mystery novel MURDER BEYOND THE MILKY WAY. http://www.amazon.com/Murder-Beyond-M... )