old soldiers

When I was young I was digging around in some stuff somewhere in our house and found a patch. It was a bit tattered around the edges like it had been sewn on poorly and ripped off. It had an eagles head with its mouth open was all. I thought it looked cool so I asked my mom what it was. "That was your great uncle Pepper's" she told me and then she told me how when she was a girl, her and her sister stayed awake in the loft of thier log cabin and listened to her Uncle Pepper Martin tell stories to my Grandpa late one night after he came home from WW II. He was surrounded at Bastone by the Germans and lost most all of his buddies. The Germans demanded that they surrender and the CO sent back a message to German High Command that said only "nuts." Uncle Pepper drove the jeep that delivered that message.
When I was a teen I met my Great Uncle Pepper. My mom let me hand his patch back to him. I remeber his words exactly."I never thought I would see this again." It was quiet in the room for a minute.
It wasn't too many years later I saw the movie version of what happened at Bastone. It matched what I heard as a boy, pretty well.
I drove out to see my mom today. While we were talking on the back porch about relatives she asked me what happened to that screaming eagle patch from the 101st Airborne. Her memory is fading but I still remember lots of the things she told me when I was young.