Thanks Dad

My father is 82 years old. He enlisted in the Navy at age 17 after his family received a telegram that his oldest brother, a private in the Army, had gone missing in Guadalcanal.


My grandfather had to sign the papers for him, since he was underage, and was so upset at his youngest son's willfulness that he didn't speak to him for weeks afterward. With one son missing and another hell-bent on heading off into something he couldn't possibly have imagined the scale of, it's not hard to see my grandfather's side of this. [Many of the things I never understood about my father, or my grandfather for that matter, have become much clearer in the past four years.]

Even so, he was proud of my Dad, who served from 1943 until 1946, the final years of his teenage-hood, with the Pacific fleet off the coast of Japan and in Leyte Gulf in the Philippines.

The experience was not one he spoke about much when I was younger. He had been on a small ship and had, I understood, seen some things he wished he hadn't. But he took it all as a matter of course and made it home safe and sound and returned to civilian life. He married late, and had kids even later, and is now the proud grandfather of three.

Still, growing up I got the distinct sense that he was somewhat amused by the trials and tribulations of my teenage years and those of my sister. I guess it's hard to take a fight about junior-year curfew all that seriously when at 17 you were on the other side of the world eating C-rations and getting ready for air-raids (not drills but the real thing).

There are not a lot of the old guard left to visit the finally completed memorial in Washington, DC, but I am hopeful that when the weather gets warmer, I can finally get my Dad down this way and that we can visit it together.

I am sure it will make him emotional, which is OK (even though it's hard to watch). And he'll probably get annoyed (as I did) at the tourists lining up in front of their state's name with big cheese-eating grins [as if a monument to the dead was like Disneyworld minus the rides].

But I want him to see it, and for my kids to be there with him --- a reminder of what he was fighting for, even if, at 17, he wasn't sure. Pace Tom Brokaw, but the greatest generation were not high-minded individuals with sophisticated geopolitical understanding and a burning desire to combat fascism. They were not people who set out to be heroes or who were self-consciously appointing themselves to save the world.

They were ordinary guys like my Dad who believed the United States of America, and all the people in it, were worth fighting for.

They were right. They still are.

Happy Veterans Day. And thanks, Dad.