Decades later on Memorial Day, my brother Bill Anderson lost his hands when a cannon misfired. He was part of the group that had performed the salute for all the intervening years. Within a short story written with the Vietnam war as a backdrop, I recalled the accident.
"Did I really know anything of war ... at that time?
It would be many years before I encountered face to face, in a dream, a neighborhood boy (Tom Dickey) who was killed in Vietnam. The meeting, long after the war and his death, gripped my heart and instructed how little I felt and knew of war. Nor had I heard then, as I would years later, my brother’s emergency room cries, bravely strained into song, as he tried to best the torture of hands shredded by a canon misfired on a peaceful Memorial Day, a fractional echo of those he intended to honor. But even today, I know only the calm, guilt and dread of the uninitiated."