HUNTING HISTORY … THE FORK OF CONTENTION!

If you’re a regular reader, you know that I have two brothers … an older  brother and a younger brother.

  My older brother was born when I was two years old …

 … and my younger brother showed up when I was ten.

As brothers, we got along pretty good. Sure, we had our little spats … and once my youngest brother stabbed me in the back with a pencil and the point broke off in my back and I was sure I was going to die of lead poisoning. Obviously I didn’t.

There was, however, one point of major contention … and that was the bullet fork of which we all claimed ownership.

This was a fork that, at one time or another, we had all used to feed our faces.

BACKGROUND HISTORY OF THE FORK — We had five uncles who served in WWII — four soldiers and one sailor. After the war, one of them brought home a shell casing and gave it to my father as a souvenir. About the same time the plastic handle of the fork we ate with broke off.  My father was a metal worker and he took the fork and the shell casing to work and shaped it into a new handle for the fork.

Naturally since we all ate with the fork, we all claimed ownership of it.  (Even though my youngest brother wasn’t born until 1949.) However, since they both got married and moved out of the house it has become a moot point … because they’ll never figure out where I hid it.

MEMORIAL DAY THOUGHT … our family has been blessed when it came to our military service. I had five uncles who served during WWII (Africa, Europe, South Pacific and Aleutian Islands) and only one was injured. He was in basic training when his rifle jammed and exploded injuring one of his eyes. He spent the rest of the war working at a desk. *** I served for two years in the army in the Veterinary Food Inspection Service in the middle of Kansas at the start of the Vietnam Conflict. *** My older brother spent two years in Vietnam at the end of the conflict. *** My youngest brother served in the Army Reserve. We were lucky, while many of our friends paid the greatest price. We respect and salute all of them for preserving all we hold dear.