A LIFE LONG JOURNEY TO WAR AND HOME

Edward O. Cyr

• Publisher: Covenant Books, Inc.
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781644686331
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Medicine Biographies

Edward "Eddie" Cyr, MSN, explores his life long journey, from a background as a second-generation immigrant to US Army colonel and nurse anesthetist in a war zone within the War on Terror, through his three deployments. His journey to his military career and experiencing war was influenced by his first generational French Canadian father, with his six brothers, along with his mother's two first generational Italian brothers who all served in World War II. He experienced the tribulations of growing up in the 1950s and '60s in a multicultural "Greatest Generation" family, which had a strong sense and pride of military service. Eddie early on experienced learning disabilities, which were not initially recognized, while being the first in his father's family to graduate from college. Eddie met his wife, Patricia, in college, in the nursing program that they both matriculated. Their marriage is blessed with five daughters and eleven grandchildren. This journey explores the decisions and difficulties from a young childhood through adulthood into his post military career. His committing to both a military and civilian career while navigating the difficulties of three deployments both in the war zone and multiple serious issues at home. It is a story of belief in self, determination, the love of a spouse and family, his military family and friendships, along with the advantages available to each of us if we trust in God and Country, all the while willing to work for what we believe we can accomplish. This is his story of not only of war and the issues of separation from family, but how he developed his desire to serve in uniform from the very beginning.

Chapter 1

Warren, Rhode Island, probably its biggest claim to fame is that it’s the “smallest town, in the smallest county, in the smallest state.” It’s where I grew up from 1950s to the early ’80s. I’m still there in some respects though, in the old north end of Water Street, known then as the Italian Section. The town around the fifties and early sixties was a typical small New England costal town made up of smaller immigrant ethnic communities. First generation Italian Catholics had settled there, claiming their little piece of America. Other Catholic nationalities also communally carved out their section of Warren. They built and supported their particular church and cultural norms within their section of town. The other non-Catholic religions also did the same in declaring their section within the town. Growing up, I never knew the formal names of any of these churches. In fact, still in present-day discussions, we still refer to them as the Italian, French, Polish, Irish, Portuguese, Baptist, and Protestant Churches. Our north end of town had tight little colonial streets with two-, three-, and the occasional four-story tenement houses. The sea was a vital part of the early economy for Warren in those early colonial years. Some of these homes dated back to the early colonial days of the shipping and boating industry.

In the north end generations of Italian immigrants lived in the same tight area as a general rule, deciding not wanting to leave parents or family or the comfort of the area. A few brave souls moved to other areas of Warren, but the north end was and is and always has been their home. For whatever the reason, it always seemed the Italian grandparents in the north end were always living on the top floor of a family tenement apartment. These tenements housed an array of extended family descendants, sons, daughters, aunts, uncles, and cousins. If they didn’t live exactly in the same house, they settled generally close to this area of the town. The old folks, our grandparents, never wanted or saw a reason to move. It seemed to me that this was some sort of unspoken Italian thing, to live in the same house, on the same top floor apartment, for their entire life. I always thought it had to be some badge of Italian heritage honor to be able to claim this fact to St. Peter at the Gates of Heaven. The grandparents all had the same response to moving. They would stay in their house until they died. They would continually tell you this, every day, for the eighty- or ninety-plus years that they were alive. They would also never forget to tell you daily that they were dying, every day, for those same eighty- or ninety-plus years. And when they did die in those days, they wanted some sort of service in their homes. Of course, there were all the relatives from the Providence and Boston area who would arrive to give their condolences. Friends with their kids and anyone else in the neighborhood would also stop by to express their sympathies. And of course there was the food; they always brought food and lots of it. There were so many relatives; you couldn’t possibly remember all their names. They certainly couldn’t remember yours. For the aunts, it was always a pinch on the cheek, a hug, a squeeze, multiple kisses, and some comment on how big you’ve grown since the last time they saw you. They seemed to always overdose themselves with too much lipstick and perfume that you couldn’t get either of them off you or your clothes. It was the tattoo you wore for the day. They all echoed the same comments. That they’ll be next to go and this may be the last time we’ll see them. As always punctuating and challenging the other female relatives with this death and dying philosophy as to how they will be the first to go. Who was the sicker, who had the most ills, or who took the most medications. I swear it has to be some type of Italian female hormonal thing. As far as I can remember, the women were always dying, but it was the men who went first. Maybe that was their escape from their wives’ constant threat of dying. I guess it was the only way to avoid it, although it was the cheap way out.

There was a certain common neighborhood standard which seemed each household enforced involuntarily. The first and foremost was everyone in the neighborhood grew tomatoes. They grew tomatoes anywhere and everywhere. There were tomatoes in buckets, pots, and small little patches of dirt that paralleled the walkway. For instance, my grandfather, in his later years for instance, had a 1951 Chevy pickup with four flat tires and the truck never moved outside his driveway. But in the bed of that truck during the summer season, there were always five-gallon buckets with tomato plants producing some of the largest tomatoes I can ever remember. Another standard, as I mentioned earlier, was the church. It was integral to this initial generation of immigrants. When they built their cultural Church, it was designed on their European model that bigger was better. If it wasn’t bigger, then the Church was given the impression of being bigger, by modeling a big an expansive entry. In order to give this illusion, there had to be about a million stairs to the front doorway with large oak doors. It must have been another unwritten Italian thing in the early years that the Church had to have more stairs than any other. This way the Church looked as if it belonged in Rome and so it had to be a good Italian Church. The downfall to this was if you happened to be chosen as pallbearer for a loved one (which I was a number of times), the casket got heavier with each step. To make matters worse by being heavier, you would always wonder why they had to bury their loved ones with all their jewelry, a countless number of rosary beads, and religious cards. As a youngster, there were so many questions, no good answers, and a slap on the head if you asked why. So you learned, just do, or at least don’t get caught not doing!

My grandparents on my mother’s side, Emilio and Rosy, owned a corner two-story tenement apartment in which we lived. We lived upstairs, on the second floor across the hall from them. Downstairs, on the first floor, my Aunt Fil, Uncle John, and their three kids were in one apartment. On the other side on the first floor was a small grocery store my grandparents ran for a short while. They evidentially stopped this business and used it as a work area for the stripping of metal for copper, tin, brass, and so forth. This metal stripping was a much more lucrative business, no bookkeeping and not much overhead. My grandmother, a diminutive woman of four feet seven inches, was always fighting the scale. She couldn’t understand her weight issue. It always seemed pretty obvious to me. The woman was always cooking, I mean always! Never did I walk into the house that she didn’t have a couple of pots on the stove, with something wonderful being prepared. Homemade pasta, bread, fresh vegetables, tomato sauce, heavy with basil, the melding of these aromas and their taste, absolutely marvelous, never to be reproduced. I would be in and out of her apartment all day and always asking, “Eating again, Grandma?” She would always respond that she’s “not eating that much and it’s only a little bit, just tastes.” Of course, it was more than a little bit all day, and it was all the time, every day. I must confess I always also had to have a little “taste.” I could never say no to whatever she had on the table, it was always too good and too plentiful to pass up. What used to really demonstrate our generational differences, and I really couldn’t get over was when she had the chicken legs sticking out of the saucepan. Claws and all attached and then using the legs as stirring spoons. Slowly cooking and with her stirring until the meat on the legs simply melted off the bone and dissolved into that wonderful sauce.

My grandpa towered over my grandma at a whooping five feet and two inches. Make no mistake; size was not an issue, he was the boss of the family. He arrived in America through Ellis Island from Italy around the beginning of World War I in Europe. He was a baker in the “old country,” always pronouncing it “Hit-a-ley.” Arriving here in America, Grandpa worked hard, as much as two shifts a day in the Warren mills for six days. He limited his living expenses and helped pay for his brothers and sisters for their passage here to America.

Grandpa never went back to Italy once he left. I would occasionally ask him why and his response never varied. He would always call me boy. He’d say, “Boy, the Italians, they always lose a war, and they don’t know how to fight; they switch sides to whoever is winning.” Then he would go on a lengthy triad on how the Italians would love, eat, drink, and sometimes get them all confused and do them all together. Grandpa was seventeen when he married Grandma. Grandma was twelve to fourteen years old. Yes, that young, plus she had five younger brothers and sisters, which she was raising. My grandma’s family had issues; the best thing to say about my great-grandparents were that they were neither very faithful to each other nor to their children. Yet when Grandpa Emilio married Rosy, he instantly had a family of five siblings, taking in my grandma’s brothers and sisters and he raised them all as his own, along with his six children which came later.

Grandma and Grandpa were married for over seventy-five years. You had to laugh when you would visit them later in life and sat in their living room. As they kept reaching each yearly milestone in their marriage, politicians, presidents, and popes would send them congratulatory certificates. Their walls resembled “Who’s Who” of influential twenty-century personalities. But these celebrities all died before my grandparents did, and each year, we would put up another plaque from someone new in authority that marveled and celebrated at their longevity together. I can’t recall how many times I sat there and commented on the certificates and photos on their wall and those that acknowledged them had died earlier. They were quite proud of these certificates, no matter how yellowed or aged they became. Another interesting note, there was also a tribute to Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin somewhere in the house along with their music at any type of family gatherings.

As I mentioned earlier, our grandparents owned a two-story tenement house with three apartments and a small corner neighborhood convince store. Our potion of the two-story tenement side had two small bedrooms on the second floor, one for my sister, Jackie, and the other for Ma and Dad, while my brother, Armand and I shared the attic bedroom. I say a bedroom with some license, however. It had no heat and no bed. The reason we had no bed was that we were continually fighting and breaking either the mattresses or the bed frames. No matter what our parents did to us, between the jumping and fighting, we broke bed after bed. Finally as a last resort, they put a box spring and mattress on the floor, gave us a couple of large blankets, and that was our bed. It was our bed until I got married at twenty-five years old, in 1976. I went sleeping with my brother in the morning to bedding with my new wife, Patricia, in the evening. The lifestyle on Water Street seemed natural to us: it’s the way we grew up; it was the only life we knew. We only had one bureau in which all our clothes fit and we used interchangeably. The only time my brother and I had our own beds were when we were in college as roommates. We did fight at the college. But wisely, we didn’t damage the college furniture. There was a damage deposit that we were held responsible for and would have had to relinquish at the end of the semester for any damages that we incurred. Then we would be held accountable to our parents on why we didn’t get our deposit back. But on weekends, we would again share the box spring and mattress at home. The older we got, the less fighting we did, and we grew accustomed and comfortable to our sleeping arrangements. As I said, there was no heat, so we would huddle together during the cold winter nights to keep warm, sort of a brotherly spooning. During the summer, it was unbearably hot and pigeons and seagulls would nest in the rafters. I actually learned to communicate with them. To this day, I still boldly think I can confuse them with some of my calls.

My sister, Jacqueline, whom we all called Jackie, was the queen of the house without question; she had one of the small bedrooms in the main portion of the apartment, along with our parents. Fortunately, my sister Jackie was able to have some type of heat during the winter. As previously mentioned, we didn’t because not only did our attic not have any heat source heat, but also there was no insulation in the rafters. It was really cold in the winter and really hot in the summer for Armand and me. In the early 1950s, the only source of heat for our apartment was a kerosene heater located in the kitchen. Dad would have to feed the kerosene heater by bringing up from our dirt basement a gallon of kerosene to heat our apartment daily during the cold periods. And as you know, kerosene has a particular order.

These were the little things that meant the passage of growing up. To be allowed to go downstairs into that dirt basement and finally bring up the fuel to heat our apartment. It meant I was getting older and trusted. Simple trusts, but an importance beyond the tasks that maybe our adult parents didn’t understand or maybe they really did. Later, Dad was able to change the kerosene heater to a gas heater. We all thought this was safer and it certainly smelled better. Armand and I were not allowed to come downstairs from the cold attic until Jackie was dressed in the morning. As she was the queen of the house, she would dress in front of the heater. But we needed Jackie; we could always count on our sister to sweet talk our parents, especially Dad, to go for a ride in the car and get ice cream or frozen lemonade. My parent’s bedroom was small and connected to an overhang of the front hallway. When we frequently didn’t have a key to open the apartment door, we would climb the balcony in the main hallway, cross over a banister, walk through my parent’s bedroom and into the apartment. Not much security in those days. In fact, although we were surrounded by no less than four to five honest to goodness barrooms, we rarely locked our doors at night. Neighborhood communication was simple and efficient. When my ma wanted me, she would literally open a window, shout my name. If I didn’t hear her and come running immediately, anyone in the neighborhood who did hear would relay the message to me that my mother was calling me. On the other side, if Ma chased me around the neighborhood with a broom, which happened more than occasionally, the neighborhood knew that also. Hey, Ma took no mercy on me with that broom, but she very rarely connected. The older ladies would later explain to me why that wasn’t proper behavior for a young man. It seemed that within the neighborhood it was common practice for the older ladies to assist in the “proper maturing” of us.

With all things considered, the north end really was a unique place. We would play catch, baseball, football in the street, or handball against the brick wall of our apartment house. I still laugh when I see the commercials replicating this type of childhood experience playing football in the street, such as “go out to Miss Easterbrook’s fence, cut across the street to the stop sign, watch for the manhole cover, look both ways, and head out to Union Street, and I’ll hit you with the pass.” We were able to walk to the neighborhood school, Liberty Street School from kindergarten to fourth grade. We used to go home for lunch, an hour every day. Our mas were always home, no two incomes in those days. Most of the teachers lived in the neighborhood. My first grade teacher, Miss Annie O’Brien and my fourth grade teacher, Miss Rogers, were my Ma’s teachers. Miss Rogers actually lived next door, and I discovered later she would update ma all the time on my misadventures. I would find out that there was no escaping the neighborhood watch, their eyes were everywhere, and whatever we did as children was reported to our parents.

There was only one car per most families in those days. We walked everywhere, to Deleckta’s, Pharmacy, Jamiel’s Shoe World, the grocery stores, such as the A&P and First National, the Lyric Theater, and Woolworths and Newbury’s Five and Dime stores. I didn’t realize how truly fortunate I was to grow up in that social environment, with those experiences, until I had children of my own. It was a lifestyle in which we would lack economically and yet we never knew financially we were at a disadvantage. It was a lifestyle of simplicity within an uncomplicated living environment. Everyone filled a role within this micro society that was much more clearly defined and accepted in those todays. There was a satisfaction in knowing where we all fit into our family, the neighborhood, our town and our nation as well. Remember, this was post-World War II. All our elders had served in the service, or supported the war, sent their children to war, sacrificed for the war or lost a significant person to the war. Sacrifice and service were expected, it was the norm that everyone shared and understood. It was a time with simple goals and meager means. Yet there was always the believability that we could attain any goal we set our sights on and these goals were all within our reach.

Chapter 2

I was the result of two immigrant grandparent families, Italian and French. On the Italian side, Grandma and Grandpa Squillante had six children total, three girls and three boys. The girls all gave them headaches. Each one of the girls had an individual personality, which was very unique. Aunt Fil, the oldest was the most rebellious. My ma, Maria, was the one who didn’t want to move away; she wanted to stay connected to her parents and her family until they passed. We did move away once for about a year and half. It was about an eighth of a mile away. Ma cried and cried. Dad couldn’t take it any more after a year, so they planned to move us back to Water Street, back to her parents’ tenement. Ma was happy, and because she was happy, Dad was very happy and peaceful. The youngest child, Aunt Carrie was the most independent. She was going to tell you what for and when. All their husbands, including my dad didn’t dare cross them. I learned that the concept of the man-of-the-house was really not applicable here. The skirts ran the house; the wives were the law, even though the men provided the house. Oh, I’m sure the men had their moments, but the sisters were the owners of each of their families. They also were the loudest; arguments were a common theme between them. Nothing earth shattering. Actually, these arguments weren’t really meaningful, just loud disagreements on a regular basis. I actually grew up believing that the arguments and loudness was the normal part of Italian heritage and socialization among siblings.

This was definitely in contrast to my grandparents however. Grandpa was the king, the law, and the enforcer of the family, and that never changed, never! The three boys went in three successful directions. Uncle Pat was a ship builder in the war and later became a janitor for the high school in Barrington, Rhode Island. Uncle Orlando “Londie” became a family practice physician, later an emergency room doctor for St. Anne’s Hospital in Fall River, Massachusetts. Their youngest son, Uncle Emilio, with his education advanced to the position of Chief of Police within the Warren Police Department. This was my Italian side, always very demonstrative. Oh god, the arguments! Lots of explosive discussions, it was a way of life! No one was immune and there were no sides taken. Each of the brothers and sisters were involved and were sucked into these “discussions” at some point in time. But none of the arguments really lasted long, were never really that serious, and never ...

Table of contents

• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• Chapter 8
• Chapter 9
• Chapter 10
• Chapter 11
• Chapter 12
• Chapter 13
• Chapter 14
• About the Author