The Hole in the Letter

Both of my parents were immigrants to the United States. They both came to this country prior to World War I. My father worked in a wire mill and my mother was a domestic housekeeper for a doctor on Harvard Street in Worcester. My father was drafted into the United States Army BEFORE he was a citizen of this country and very nearly gave his life for this country in the Argonne Forest of northern France where he fought in some of the bloodiest fighting. He was a soldier with the 77th Division.
There were five boys in my family. My father kept his war memorabilia in an old steamer trunk and sometimes when we had a snow day in the winter, we would explore that trunk. We would look at and try on the old gas mask. (It had an awful musty odor!) There was a picture with an angel with a sword and a soldier on one knee. The angel appears to be knighting the soldier. Other papers were yellowed and crumbling with age. The one prize that stands out in all our minds was a small envelope addressed to my father containing a letter. Both envelope and letter had a hole through the middle of it. It was a BULLET hole. We all know the story by heart...
The 77th Division was fighting in the Argonne Forest of Northern France. It was 1918. My mother wrote my father and told him about the terrible deaths happening in the United States (The Flu Epidemic of 1918) My father wondered what in the world she was complaining about when he was seeing such terrible death all around him every day in the Argoone Forest.(He did not realize just how bad the epidenic was at home.) The American division was advancing against the Kaiser's German soldiers just outside the town of Saint Juvin (France). The fighting was fierce. My father felt something go between his pack and his back. He asked a comrade to check him to see if he had been hit. He thought the bullet went between his back and his pack. After it was determined that he was okay, he continued to advance with his unit. A few minutes later he was hit by a sniper's bullet and the bullet pierced the letter from his mother which was in his rear pants pocket. Two medics placed him on a stretcher and started to carry him back from the frontlines. When the firing became too intense, the two soldiers dropped the stretcher and ran! My father was left there on the battlefield and had to crawl back under fire to a church on the edge of town. Growing up we listened to this story many times and we told my father (kiddingly) that the fact that the letter was in his BACK pocket proved that he must have been running away! Of course, he would always defend himself by saying that we did not understand combat!! We had to understand that the enemy was not always just in front, but could be all around you. Of course we knew this, but we enjoyed getting my father to react the way we could predict that he would every time!
When the war ended, a group of soldiers who were immigrants were taken from Fort Devens, Massachusetts down to Boston, Massachusetts and sworn in as citizens of the United States. That is how my father became a citizen. Perhaps this is why today I look with some suspicion upon these characters who look with disdain upon the word MULTICULTURALISM. I wish they had known my father and the soldiers who stood beside him in that room in Boston and became citizens that day. They might not be so narrowminded.