A Veteran’s Day

The veteran I knew best was my father – a World War II era draftee who served from mid-1941 until late 1945, including more than three years overseas.

He served in the Army Air Corps as a medical technician at an Army Air Corps fighter base in England. Most of the action he saw was in post mission clean up, when he joined the crews which would rescue the injured or retrieve the bodies of pilots whose planes made it to England, but crashed before reaching the airfield.

His memorable brush with danger came late in the war, when the Germans were indiscriminately launching V-1 “buzz bombs” at the cities and bases along the English coast. He was riding a bicycle along an country road when he heard a noise to his side, and looked to see a bomb skimming the earth toward him. He dove from the bike into a ditch as the bomb stuttered overhead.

My father wasn’t a loud patriot, shouting his support for the government in the “my country right or wrong” tenor that many of today’s “patriots” support their government.

He showed his patriotism by example rather than by talk, offering his neighbors the dignity and respect of being equal citizens in an equal society. His most overt acts were standing at attention facing the flag with his hand over his heart during public ceremonies where the National Anthem played, flying a flag on holidays, and later in life, raising at dawn and lowering at dusk the banner of his country on a pole installed in his front yard. One of the more memorable pictures of him was raising the flag one morning with two of his grandchildren standing at attention and saluting as he performed the ceremony.

He would talk in general terms about the freedoms – upholding the principle of freedom of thought and freedom of expression even if he didn’t agree with the ideas expressed.

About the only time I heard him talk publicly about his service was during one “father-son” baseball game where, following the national anthem, my brother-in-law, who had served in Vietnam, taunted the younger males of the family by saying loudly, “I note that I’m the only veteran standing during the national anthem.”

Dad quietly said that he believed four year’s service in World War II qualified him for the distinction as well. My brother-in-law admitted that World War II was indeed a war and apologized in his grudging way.

Ironically, it was during that Vietnam War that I learned my father’s dedication to the country.

I was a college student in the late 60s, and being strapped for funds, often used my father’s services as a barber at the times I chose to have my hair cut. It was one of those jobs he did to save money, investing in a barber kit when I was a pre-teen with three brothers to trim our hair. Eventually, when the sons were ranging in age from one to 18, he cut all seven sons' hair on a regular basis.

During my college days, when I was living at home and commuting to classes, I’d catch about every other session until I decided to let my hair grow after I’d moved out of the house.

During those sessions, he’d talk with his boys about what concerned them, and after awhile, the boys would bring their concerns to him for advice.

It was one session a couple of years after I’d graduated from high school that I brought my greatest problem to him.

I’d become engulfed in campus activism starting in late 1968, the year after I started my studies in communications arts with a focus on print journalism. After taking a few classes, I got the itch to write, and offered to become a reporter on the school newspaper.

The task was decentralized, in that, there was no strong “newsroom” focus. Assignments were casually offered out based on students calling for publicity and new journalism students seeking some advice on stories they could write. But, for the most part, with a volunteer writing staff and only a few who would work on every issue, the news editor and the managing editor used whatever stories the unpaid reporters brought back, focusing their time on insuring some fairness and double checking accuracy.

It meant that a reporter with some ambition, and an ability to write well was pretty free to pick his / her topics so long as they related back to the campus.

My hot topic was the war and what was going on with students at our campus to address it.

The war had seemed like game playing to me at first. In my pre-high school days, I thought it was “cool” that I could watch this war in the same manner I’d watched the Korean conflict play on my family’s black and white Motorola screen in my first memories.

As I got older, I'd found my father's "Time - Life Pictures of World War II" volume, and would regularly leaf through it looking at the soldiers and the mighty equipment which was used when my father served.

It wasn’t until 1967 that it hit me as “real” when I went with some ex-athletes from my high school to the funeral of the guy I’d known as a coach in my senior year, and the others had known as their quarterback in their earlier playing years.

He looked like the guy who had visited school in his uniform the spring following my first, and last, football season. He was proud of his graduation from infantry school then and happy to be with his friends. This time he wasn’t joking with the guys – he was resting in his casket.

I was in my first year in college when the call came that Carl had been killed.

Standing at the casket, it struck me that the scenes I watched on our family’s color TV weren’t the “games” I’d envisioned when I watched the conflict in Korea, and later played “war” with my friends using little rubber soldiers and off-sized military equipment to set up "battles" in neighborhood sandboxes, and still later with mimic guns running around “the woods” a half mile from my suburban home.

Unlike our games of “war” where the rubber soldiers were “dead” if knocked over by a tossed dirt clod, or "battles" were won in the woods based on how many times someone got the drop on you and “shot” you, Carl wasn’t going to play again.

So, I looked into what was the basis for the fighting, and then saw one friend join the Marines, and another get drafted into the Army after he’d dropped out of school to earn some cash to pay for tuition.

The first friend eventually was wounded, and, I learned later, deserted from the military rather than return. After he dropped from sight, I learned that his cousin was on the newspaper with me. I mentioned we were friends, but I hadn't talked to him in years. His cousin said, "Didn't you know he deserted? He's avoiding everyone!"

The second and I stayed in touch, and corresponded regularly – me offering him a view of “home” and he offering me a view of “war.”

I recall one letter which said, “Don’t come over here if you can avoid it. We’re only over here for Michelin rubber” after my writing changed from news of home to sharing (and seeking some common ground on) my observations of the dysfunction of the politics which got us into the war.

Wrestling with it, I decided that to honor my friend who was there, I wouldn’t avoid service, but I didn’t want to learn how to kill another man simply because some politician forced me to carry a gun.

It was during one of those haircuts when my father and I were talking about politics, and Vietnam. I was scared, but thought I should tell him what I was thinking about.

“Dad,” I said. “I know you are a veteran, but I’m checking into fighting the draft. I’m looking into being a conscientious objector. I’m not going to run away, but I’m not going to let them make me carry a gun and kill people.”

There was a long pause, which made me more nervous. Finally Dad said, “I brought you guys up to make your own decisions.

“I served, but it was to make sure that we had the freedom to make those decisions.

“I support whatever you’re comfortable with.”

Take care,

jim