Weapons of Mass Destruction by Margaret Vandenburg Page B

heritage had pretty much dissipated by the time he was a teenager. The Great Spirit had been distilled into a bottle, and the noble savage was a drunk. Sinclair’s father’s faults were more subtle, but no less egregious. The hired hands called him Mr. Sinclair, not without a hint of wicked western irony. All he ever did was sit at his desk, balancing books and delegating chores. He wore chinos and loafers and actually drank tea. With milk and sugar. Grandpa was the only real man left on the ranch, a throwback to the days when ranchers were still cowboys, not accountants. A lot can change in a single generation.
    Grandpa was a living reminder of the unprecedented moral integrity of the Greatest Generation. His country sounded the alarm, and he mustered the quintessence of honor and altruism that transformed mere men into heroes. He rarely talked about how he came by the medals locked in his desk drawer. Humility was the better part of valor. But he liked to tell tales of his father’s adventures in the war to end all wars, the nation’s first brush with greatness. Times were hard in the hinterland. The ranch was struggling financially as the horse market adjusted to railroad monopolies in commercial transportation. The Sinclair boys picked up day labor when they could find it, especially in the off-season. Grandpa’s father had been mining silver in the high country when he first heard the distant drums of war. A backward backwoodsman and proud of it, he wound up drinking champagne in the capitals of Europe. Needless to say, there was a fair amount of fighting somewhere in between the woods and the champagne. But no matter how much Sinclair probed, he always heard the same expurgated version of World War I.
    “In the days when mountains still had veins of silver and whores had hearts of gold,” Grandpa always said as he warmed to the telling.
    Sinclair sat on Grandpa’s lap until he was old enough to know what a whore was. Then he sat at his feet on a bear skin rug. There was always a fire flickering, if not on their hearth then somewhere near the front lines. Grandpa’s voice seemed to travel great distances, spanning decades as well as continents.
    “Without a moment’s hesitation, he and his pals shipped off to see the world. Miners and ranchers and farm boys who’d never stepped foot outside Montana. Who’d never even heard of Archduke Ferdinand, much less the Young Bosnians. Just imagine.”
    Sinclair’s imagination took wing. For every dyed-in-the-wool military man, there was a narrative archetype, a story that captured his fancy and held it hostage until he enlisted. In every war, the brutality of cold hard facts on the ground eventually gave way to the irresistible aura of heroism. No doubt Grandpa told his father’s tale rather than his own because it sounded more mythic than real, at least until soldiers ended up shell-shocked or blinded by mustard gas. He willingly recounted fording the River Somme and breaking the stalemate at Château-Thierry. But when the Great War descended into the dank darkness of No Man’s Land, something always came up. He had errands to run or it was high time Billy went to bed. The mere mention of his own tours of duty, three decades later in the same war-torn European fields and forests, sent him rushing off to nonexistent chores.
    “Can’t you see he doesn’t want to talk about it?” Sinclair’s father would say when Grandpa disappeared.
    “He’s modest, that’s all,” Sinclair said.
    “He’s trying to forget. Stop badgering him, Billy.”
    Sinclair’s worldview was free of doubt and ambiguity. A family’s military legacy was something to be proud of, plain and simple. If anything, Grandpa’s reticence to reminisce about actual combat enhanced its mystique. Surely blood-soaked trenches epitomized the honor of sacrifice, not the futility of butchering a generation of young men for the sake of a few cubic feet of devastated land. Where his father had the gall