My Grandfather's Army Jacket

Teenagers in love and war

I still have my maternal grandfather’s army jacket from World War II. It used to hang in my grandparent’s basement, in a cedar-lined closet. I remember opening that closet door sometimes, where all the winter coats were stored and taking deep gulping breaths of the smell of cedar, old wool, and cigar smoke. The scent of my grandfather. It was the smell of love and comfort.

At some point in time, he gave me the army jacket. I don’t know how that happened-how it was given to me. I do remember having it in my closet when I was teenager and remembering a vague story of grandfather telling me he was wearing the jacket the day he saw Mussolini hanging in a piazza in Milan.

He would have only been in his late teens as he went to war when he was quite young, lying about his age so he could join his older brothers in the fight. I have no idea if he really saw Mussolini or not, but the story hangs in the closet of mind, right next to my grandfather’s jacket.

How can a jacket carry such gruesome stories for my grandfather and yet also hold stories of young love for me?

In my sophomore year of high school, I decided the jacket was a unique fashion statement and began wearing it as a coat on chilly nights. I especially remember wearing it to high school football games and to the dances afterwards.

After the game, we would line up outside the gym and wait to be let into the school dance. There was always an air of excitement-the smell of hormones, Obsession, and Drakkar Noir floating along the line of high school students. The anticipation of dancing, flirting and freedom from our parents was overwhelming.

I would stand there in a deep state of both excitement and anxiety. I worried that I would be end up a wallflower. I would burrow into my jacket when I was overwhelmed by fear. It was my security blanket for my teen years. Somehow it always felt like my grandfather was hugging me, protecting me.

As an adult, the thought isn’t lost on me that my grandfather wore the jacket when he was only a few years older than me and worried about staying alive, not who he would ask to dance. Did he burrow into that jacket too on those cold, terrifying nights in the Po Valley?

I was wearing my grandfather’s army jacket the night I was standing in line with my first real boyfriend and his best friend. The three of us did everything together. We spent many afternoons after school, at Rhino Records, pouring over albums. The boys loved Depeche Mode, ABC, and Soft Cell and introduced me to the music that would become the soundtrack of my teens. We would spend hours, flipping through crates of records, looking for 12” remixes of our favorite songs.

On this night, as we stood in line for the school dance, my boyfriend’s best friend got down on his knee front of me and sang All of My Heart by ABC. He was a very tall 6’3” to my 5’1” and it was a joke that we were same height when he was on his knees. I laughed. I thought he was just kidding around. He got up, laughing it off too.

A few months later, my boyfriend and I broke-up. His best friend asked me to be his date for the Christmas formal. He later admitted that, the night he sang to me, he was really trying to tell me he had a crush on me. Why I didn’t figure that out at the time is beyond me, especially if you listen to the lyrics. That boy was my first real love. We dated for nine months and separated amicably.

I still have the army jacket. It hangs in the back of my closet. Somehow, I think it still smells of my grandfather mixed with my high school perfume. I doubt it really does. Likely it smells like old wool and my brain just inserts the layered scent memories for me.

It contains multitudes of memories; it is a jacket that went from seeing the horrors of war to the innocence of young love. A jacket I will allow my daughter to wear one day in the hopes that she is wearing it the night a boy, shyly, speaks of love to her. A jacket, I hope she can wear, without hearing stories of war.