This is my father, born in 1916 in Iowa in a house with no electricity and no indoor plumbing. His father was born in the US, but his grandfather came over from what is now Germany as a teenager, in 1846. The family landed at New Orleans and made their way north, but arrived in Iowa in a cold winter, so they had to live in a cave that year until the ground thawed and they could build a place to live. The fact that our ancestors lived in caves has always been a good line to respond to petty complaints from my kids.
This picture, as far as we can tell, was taken about 1938 or 1940. He already had the hands I remember as his hallmark; the most massive and muscular things most people had ever seen on a man his size.
We had his army uniform: The chest on the jacket was a size 42; the waist on the pants was 28".
His life, by all accounts, was not easy; perhaps it would be better to say it was ill-timed. He graduated from 8th grade at the start of the depression, and if there was any hope of him going to high school, that pretty much ended it. There was a farm to save, and all the kids had to work to keep it from slipping away. "For my 8th grade graduation," he once told me, "my father put a collar on my and hitched me to the horses pulling the plow."
Then, of course, World War II called, and although he was a bit older than most of the young men we send to battle, he served in the US Army. We only heard a few snippets of what he went though: Training in Hawaii included crawling through tunnels barely big enough to fit through. If the lead person went the wrong way, they'd all have to back up and try the next route. Or his comment about how the Italian kids from New York and New Jersey thought they were tough, but puked while running or doing any physical work. The snake in the south Pacific he swore had a head the size of a pig's. Cooling beer by putting the bottles in 100-octane gas and putting an air hose in it to bubble it, one of the good memories, I guess. (I've checked this with someone who knows why this works, and it apparently does, for some reason still lost to me.)
Most of what we heard about the war was not from him. Occasionally his war buddy, Danny Boyd, would call after having a few drinks, and dad would listen to him. He'd wrap it up when Danny would eventually start crying on the other end, and dad would look sad and maybe a bit hurt; I'm guessing he tried to bury those feelings, and Danny had to dig them up again.
A Christmas card from another one of his fellow soldiers, who remarked about what a strong and calm man dad was, as if those two things were not common in one man, at least during war time.
At his funeral, his friends told us about his being air-dropped into New Guinea to clear a runway out of the jungle with a bulldozer and one other soldier, who was shot and killed by a sniper within minutes of parachuting in. Dad had to live behind the blade of the bulldozer for two days until the next drop came. We also heard from mom about some of what he went through, like using the bulldozer (his life's vocation) to dig mass graves and bury piles of bodies there. She couldn't finish the sentences; she shook her head and waved her hands as if to make the specter in the room disappear forever. It never did.
Rose Agnes, his only living sibling of seven brothers and two sisters, simply said, "I think the war was harder on your dad than on the other boys," meaning her two other brothers who were in WWII, one of whom got the purple heart at Anzio, and who famously stopped one of his letters mid-composition to say, "Gerry (the Germans) is shooting at us, and I'm going to breakfast now, and I don't know if I'll be back," but of course, he was, which we know because he finished the letter and came home alive.
That's dad in the back row, second from the right; and his sister Rose Agnes, the youngest, smiling in the front row next to my grandfather. Bert, the one from the breakfast story, is second from left.
So, yes, war was hard on him, as it is on almost everyone I've known who's gone. I'm sure now--but didn't know then--that he came back with both depression and PTSD; the war was harder on him than it was on the other boys, and I suppose the bottle was the one thing that dulled the pain and the confusion and the guilt and the remorse. Every night he'd stop at a local tavern and drink until dinner; he'd spend most of the time after dinner yelling--literally yelling--at no one in particular, but anyone who would listen about his work day until he went to bed, only to get up and do it again. Saturday was two trips to the tavern: One in the morning, and one in the afternoon. Sunday was just one, after Mass, because he had to cross the river to Illinois to drink in a tavern on Sunday. It was the only therapy he ever got; there were other guys like him in the tavern, and I suspect they all knew. Just knowing that someone understood may have offered some degree of comfort or relief.
Still, he got up to go to work every morning, not saying much to anyone, alone most of the day on his bulldozer, working hard, and supporting a family. I can't imagine how hard it must have been. And how strong he must have been to do so. And, as you can tell from this picture taken about 1950 with my older sister, he was a strong man. That's not a trick of the camera, by the way: His arms, his wrists, and his hands, all built by plowing fields the hard way, and by baling hay, really were that big. He once, to the amazement of my friends, picked up my Suzuki 750 with one hand. He once picked a man up off a bar stool by his belt buckle and set him on the bar to get him to stop lipping off to the bartender. And as strong as he was, war still wrecked him.
I think of this every time Veterans Day comes around.
But what inspired me to write this post was a day in Walgreens, several years ago, when the carbuncular young clerk asked me at checkout, "Do you want to donate to buy gum for the troops?" I wanted to unload on the absurdity of it, but I knew the kid was doing what some moron in corporate headquarters 40 miles away on the north shore of Chicago had cooked up to make the company seem more "patriotic." "No," I said, "not today."
Since then I've posted something like this every year on Facebook, but I left for a while, and put it here so I wouldn't have to type it every year. I only went back to manage an 8th grade reunion, and if I leave again, it'll be here.
It's puzzling to me how we got here. It doesn't seem to bother anyone else that old, hunched over guys have to sell cheap paper flowers on Memorial Day weekend to take care of the veterans who come home sick or broken or both. It doesn't seem to bother enough people that the ones who go off "to fight for our freedoms" are the children of the people who have the least, while the people who have the most get deferrals for bone spurs. It doesn't seem to bother anyone else that the very word "veteran" has morphed into something people from my father's generation wouldn't recognize. Don't believe me?
Think about the news stories about "The veteran who was robbed at gunpoint." Why is the word veteran important? It's not, but it gets a reaction out of you.
Look at the NFL, which has become the church of the military industrial complex, with American flags the size of the damn football field, and the featured veterans that we're all supposed to stand and cheer for, or risk being labeled un-patriotic. Wave the flag. Cheer the troops. Don't bother to think about anything beyond what you've been conditioned to believe.
Consider the last time I went to church (already against my better judgment) at Christmas time, when the priest asked us to applaud the Marine in his full dress uniform in the front row. In church. At Christmas, a time when we celebrate the birth of someone who told us to love our neighbor and turn the other cheek. Everyone, conditioned to do so, of course, not only applauded, but stood to do so. Well, almost everyone. I was discouraged from asking the priest after church if he'd ever asked the crowd to cheer for someone home from the Peace Corps. Cooler heads, you know. And I wouldn't have wanted to punch a priest.
We send young people into the military often because there is no economic opportunity in America, having allowed the Reagan tax cuts to direct the wealthy to stockpile hoards of cash and assets in ways no Vanderbilt or Rockefeller could have imagined. We send them into harm's way to protect profits of oil companies under the guise of protecting liberty, sometimes in countries where there is none to be had in the first place. We invest in nuclear weapons and fighter jets instead of decent education or highways or health care.
Dad once told me, "We weren't fighting for anyone's freedoms. We were fighting not to get shot ourselves," and that has always made more sense to me.
I'm not a pacifist. I think--I know--we need a military to defend us against some bad actors in the world. And I am extraordinarily grateful for the men and women who are willing to put themselves in harm's way to do that, when it's necessary.
But I also wonder why we don't do everything we can to participate in the ultimate form of respect for veterans, by keeping them out of senseless conflicts so they can come home after their service in one piece, both mentally and physically. It seems only after the damage has been done to good men and women that we realize that all the rhetoric, all the brain-washing, all the conditioning, is almost certainly designed to make you forget about the reality and enormity of war, and the incalculable costs of it.
Because if the cost of war was the first thing you thought of, you might think differently about it.
We let the people in power pull it all off because people buy into the myth that these soldiers are fighting for freedom, as if we are somehow the only country that has freedom. (Guess what? You're more free to talk about Critical Race Theory in Sweden than you are in a public university in Florida.) I bet they cannot believe their good fortune at finding such a gullible group of people to not only allow it, but encourage it.
And despite the trillions of dollars we spend on our military, we still chip in to buy gum or foot powder or books or socks--socks, for crissakes--for soldiers.
Of course, like anyone who complains about the injustice of history, I realize that had even the slightest thing been different, I wouldn't be here. No WWII, and maybe my parents marry other people. The sniper aims at my father instead of the other guy? No me. So we are all--every one of us--products of both the good and bad, right and wrong, fortune and misfortune.
We can't change the past, but I wonder why we don't hope for and try to bring about a better future, one free of people who come home damaged and broken.
I made peace with my father too late. I stood on his grave one day and apologized to him for not understanding what he had endured, and what he had gone through. I asked him why he didn't tell us. But of course, that's not what men who came back from WWII did, Perhaps they thought that putting that burden on someone else was even worse than carrying it yourself.
This is what I think about every Veterans Day. This, and my dad, who smiled like this as we went off to war, but seldom like this after he came back.
