This is probably the only real story I wrote for my english class last year, check out all the poems I've added. But I really really like this story, and I'm very proud of it, so please tell me what you think. Pay close attention to the ending.

Brea

Jonathan Franklin

I once had a son. He was born just after the start of the war. He was one whole year old when I enlisted, two the last time I saw him. My wife, my darling Calia , she begged me not to go, not to leave our family and our home. But I had to do my duty. It was December 26th, 1915 – the day after Christmas. They gave me a bayonet, a knife, a rifle, and a uniform, black boots and hard helmet included. Two months later I was sent out, basic training was over and I - barely a man at twenty-six, already a father, a husband, and still a son - was first introduced to the pain of the trenches.

Walter Brooke, a man from London, was the first on the front to shake my hand. I told him I’d been to London once, how I loved the Big Ben clock tower. He was the first man to die that day; a stray rifle round hit him between the eyes. Watching his blood run, a darker red than I’ve ever seen, dirt mixing with pieces of bone and bits of brain, I imagined my future, lying there like him, never seeing my wife or son again. How I made it a year, I’ll never know, but a Christmas miracle came in the form of a sympathetic Corporal who sent me home to see my son.

I remember seeing him play; rolling a ball in front of him and grabbing it back. He was suspicious of my helmet, and I thought that perhaps he knew, as young children so often know, that it symbolized something evil, something rotten. When he tried to put it on his head, and giggled as it fell over his eyes, I took it away, locking it in a high cupboard and not looking at it until I returned to the frontlines.

I’d been back in the trenches a month and I could still hear my wife’s words of farewell, taste her kisses, and see my boys childish finger wave and hear his baby-talked goodbyes. There was no way we could have seen it, no way we could have stopped it, and no way to escape. The bomb hit our meager hole, and fifty-two men lost their lives.

I once had a son. I once had a wife. A mother and father too. And they once had me. But here I stand, my uniform tattered and my helmet lost in the land of the barely living, blood still dripping from my shattered head, my arms, my side, a never ending drip of blood. My son’s grown now, with his own wife and his own little boy. He kisses them goodbye, waves again from the street, and whistles on his way to work.

He doesn’t wear a uniform, he doesn’t carry a knife, sword, or rifle, and he doesn’t own a helmet. Never a thought enters his mind of war, nor of blood drenched dirt, or terrifying, earth-shattering explosions. And I am glad. Perhaps in my absence, I have given him more than I could have hoped: a life free of those horrifying thoughts that have plagued me for years.

And as my wife, old and wrinkled and beautiful with her age, rocks with her small grandson on the porch and tells him a story of the past, I hear a name, spoken from her lips and carried on the wind, and I pause a moment in recognition until I realize the name is mine, that my Calia is telling little Jonathan Franklin the third not about his grandfather the soldier, but about his grandfather the young man, a young father, with a young son, who never played with a helmet.