Kate Whitney

This is real. One of my grandfathers was pulled out of the Philippine jungle, where he'd been eating rats he stabbed with a knife on a pole. They put him on a boat to the US, and let him off in SF with a train ticket and zero other steps. Have a nice life, sorry about all your buddies getting killed! He came back to MA, married my grandmother, had a kid. Haunted by nightmares and drinking heavily, he lost his mind, went back to Cali, started a second family. Then wracked with guilt and also more nightmares he left them, came back to his first family. For the rest of his life he had to sleep in a separate bed, because if you got near him while he was sleeping he might wake up trying to kill you. He kept a sawed off double barrel 12ga under his car seat and pulled it on people multiple times. He was generally jolly, fun loving, fearless, and generous. But about certain things was on a hair trigger and would become violent, mean, and triggered to drink heavily. He was a fireman who risked his life to save children from burning buildings in the era before good safety gear, and he also stole a slice of land from the town with forged paperwork. As the eldest grandson of his eldest son he'd plop me in the car seat of his gigantic 70's Lincoln, and drive me around aimlessly, no speaking, no radio, "running errands". Occasionally he'd break the silence to tell me a fragment of a crazy war story, or to give me life advice about women or how to fight or why to never, ever join the military unless the Continental US was under attack. He was a complicated man who left much unsaid to the end of his days. He was one of my childhood heroes.