I suppose it’s a miracle that both my grandfathers, serving in different parts of the world, survived World War II. While my paternal grandfather described his entire experience as ‘marching around Europe with a bayonet,’ my maternal grandfather, Albert Owens, opens up a bit more.
Now 85, he tells the story of his time in Okinawa as if it were yesterday. A marine at 17, he was wounded in 1945 at the age of 19.
Asleep in a pit, he says he felt something on him. He tried to brush it off, looked up, and felt as if he were punched in the face. He got up and left the hole, and told the others that ‘something funny was going on down in that hole.’ He thought it was a toad.
At this point, he couldn’t see out of his right eye. Someone shone a flashlight into the hole, saw a snake, and shot its head off.
The doctor couldn’t save my grandfather’s eye, and had to remove it before there were problems with the other one. He now has a glass eye.
The snake, which was poisonous, sank its fangs directly into my grandfather’s eyeball. Direct hit. Believe it or not, that likely saved his life because the blood vessels in the eye don’t lead out (I’m not exactly sure how it works but you get the idea). Had the snakebite happened on the eyelid, or the cheek, or the forehead, my grandfather might have died right there in that pit, he wouldn’t have gotten married and had kids and I wouldn’t be here today (because, you know, it’s all about me, haha.)
The snake was an Okinawan habu, and there was a farm nearby which collected them. He didn’t know why, nor did he care. But the Internet tells me why:
“On the island of Okinawa, this species is heavily collected, primarily for use in habu sake. Actually not sake, but a stronger liquor called awamori, it is alleged to have medicinal properties. The production includes the snakes in the fermentation process and it is sold in bottles that may or may not contain the body of a snake.“
That better be some good liquor.
My grandfather also tells me what he was doing just a day or two before he was blinded in his right eye for life. He was hunting a chicken.
Albert Owens, January 3, 1926 ““ December 3, 2012