Grampa’s Got a Gun – Pee Paw and the Big One

There is something about that title “Grampa’s Got a Gun” that has a ring to it.  I’m not sure what it is.  Maybe it’s just the alliteration.  I like the photo as well.  I’ve posted other photos of my paternal grandfather Robert Joseph Landry, Sr. in World War I – aka Pee Paw in the Big One – and this is the first one that shows him with a gun.  It is from the A. J. Collection, which means that I got it from my uncle AJ earlier this year.

My grandfather Robert Joseph Landry, Sr. is the tall one on the right in the photo. It was taken at Camp Lee in Virginia.

It’s such a good photo, too.  So clear and in focus that you can see that Pee Paw is the only one that is not wearing gloves.  Did the southern boy not know how to dress for cold weather or did he just not like wearing gloves?

It was taken at Camp Lee in Virginia which is near Petersburg, Virginia.  This was a training site for soldiers during World War I.  I’m saying that it was at Camp Lee because that is what was written on the photo.  The photo also had a date of 1919 on it.  This does not match with the 1917 date I had on other photos of Pee Paw at this camp.  One of these days I will get incontrovertible proof of when he was stationed at Camp Lee.  In the meantime let’s just say it was sometime around 1918.

And everybody knows what happened in 1918, right?  There was a worldwide influenza epidemic.  In looking for information for this post, I saw that during that epidemic 10,000 soldiers were stricken by the flu, and 700 of those died as a result.  So some of these men went to train to fight in a huge international conflict but ended up dying before they completed training because they caught a flu virus.  Known as “The Spanish Flu” and “La Grippe” this version of the flu killed more soldiers than were killed through warfare.

So Pee Paw made it through the Great War.  He did not see action, but he was faced with the greatest killer at that time.  He survived that microscopic enemy, and that gun didn’t help him a single bit.

I still like the title, though.