Thursday, November 11, 2010

A Meditation on The Veteran I Love Most of All


My dad joined the Army in 1944. He was drafted into service, but he tried to enlist even before he received his draft notice. He wanted to enlist, I think, because he didn't know what else to do with himself. Options were limited, in those days, especially for a guy with a background like my father's.

My dad grew up in the eye of a storm of dysfunction. His own father was rarely around—and even when he was, he certainly didn't do much to support the large family he'd helped to create. By the time my dad was 15 years old, in 1941, his mother was pregnant again and his father was nowhere to be found. My grandmother died under what were always represented as mysterious circumstances; "some kind of cancer, probably," was what my dad told me when I was younger. They had no money for doctors, and medicine was primitive at best, so it made sense to me that the cause of her death might be more or less unknown. More recently, though, my dad told me that his sister Pat claimed their mother's death was due to a self-induced abortion. It made sense, he said, given the way she died.

I don't know what that means, exactly—and to be honest, I really don't want to know.  But it pains me that my father had to see whatever he saw at the end of his mother's life.

My grandmother died on my dad's 15th birthday: October 23rd, 1941. After that, he was on his own. His two older sisters were already gone—one got married, and one just disappeared after saying "None of you will ever see me again." No one did. As the oldest kid left in the house, then, it was my dad's responsibility to make sure his brothers and sisters had shoes for their mother's funeral. Most of them didn't. (In October. In Iowa.) That meant a trip to the welfare office in town, where they all got vouchers that allowed them to purchase shoes at a local store. And after the funeral, they scattered to live with various relatives. Except my dad, and his brother Mike: they were old enough to take care of themselves, apparently. My dad had long since stopped going to school, so he and Mike worked for room and board on various farms. After a few years, my dad enlisted. Going to war must have seemed like a more honorable way to make a living.

In spite of the fact that he served in two wars—World War II and Korea—was shot twice, and still carries a piece of a grenade in his left arm, I don't think my dad has ever regretted his military service. In the Army, he rose through the ranks to Master Sergeant and learned how to be a leader. He taught ROTC for many years, both at the university and high school level. When I was very young, it wasn't uncommon for people who saw him out in public somewhere—like the K-mart parking lot, for instance—to snap to attention and salute. He wasn't in the service anymore, but his ROTC students remembered him. I was always convinced that my dad must be vaguely famous in the military world. I once asked him why he watched the violence of the Vietnam War play out on the evening news, and he said "I'm watching to see if they need me to go back." I fully expected to hear Walter Cronkite speak his name some evening, asking him to report for duty immediately.

A few weeks ago, one of those ROTC students—now an old man himself—wrote my dad a letter. He'd heard that my father's health is failing, and he wrote to thank my dad for being an example of the kind of man he wanted to become. "I am the man I am today because of you," he wrote. I'm not sure my dad remembers his military service, at this point, or even his years of teaching ROTC, but I choose to believe he can understand that he made a difference in the lives of other people.

None of my father's children have chosen lives of military service. My dad never encouraged us to do that. He never discouraged it, either, but I think he worked hard to make sure we had many options. He was strict about all of us getting good grades because he'd seen how limited his own career prospects were, outside the military, by his GED and lack of a college degree. When he met with a job counselor after being discharged from the army, that counselor looked at his file and said "I really don't know what kind of job you're qualified for—we don't have much call for a hired gun out here in the real world."

I didn't hear about that encounter for twenty years after it occurred. When he did tell me about it, my father said "Can you believe someone saying that to me? This was the counselor we were supposed to meet with. He was the person who was supposed to help us veterans find jobs after we'd left the service, and he says something like that."  Those words hurt my father--not only because he was following orders, doing exactly as he'd been told by his superiors, but because in his mind, military service was only honorable. He retired from the service in 1966. In the pre-Vietnam world of his tenure in the army, prior to the general questioning of authority that became part of the fabric of our culture, there was no question in anyone's mind that being a soldier would be a respectable way to make a living. And respectability was, above all things, my father's goal in life. After his first 18 years, respectability was the only thing he believed to be of value. For someone to suggest that his military service had been anything less than honorable was not just hurtful—it was potentially shattering.

He moved on, though, just as he moved on from everything else in his life that might have destroyed him or made him bitter. That kind of grit is part of my father's DNA, and he was always devoted to the idea that everyone is entitled to an opinion--even an opinion that he found personally hurtful. That was part of what he fought for, after all.  "Somebody else's bad attitude is never an excuse for yours," he told me, on more than occasion.  So he found a job on his own, with the postal service, and rose through the ranks again, this time into middle management. He and my mother played bingo at the NCO Club on the nearby National Guard base. Eventually, he started going to meetings at the VFW lodge. He remained proud of his military service, no matter what anyone else wanted to think about it. When I was home for his birthday this year, we took him out to dinner and he wore the Purple Heart baseball cap he wears anytime he leaves the house. We sang Happy Birthday over dessert. Just before we left, another customer walked past our table on his way out of the restaurant and stopped to shake my father's hand. "Happy Birthday, sir. Thank you for your service," he said. My father nodded—a little confused, I think, as to whether this was someone he should recognize—then thanked the man in return.

I thought about my dad yesterday afternoon when I heard a young student on my campus—a member of the reserves, once deployed and now getting the college education my father never received—fulminating to one of my colleagues about, among many other things, the lack of appreciation among college students for veterans like himself. "These people need to be sent to a third world country where you have to fight for your life instead of just living off someone else's effort," he said. "Then maybe they'd shut up with their opinions about this war and just show a little gratitude."

Here's what I would have liked to say to that young man:  My dad didn't fight two wars for the sake of gratitude. He fought for his own sense of self-worth. He fought so that I would have the right to disagree with you about prayer in public schools, the words "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance, and probably a million other things, in spite of the fact that you clearly believe I haven't earned the right to have an opinion. My father is carrying around a piece of shrapnel in his arm precisely so that I do have that right. You characterize that as "living off someone else's effort."  My dad would not.  He would call it a privilege he was proud to provide for both of us, even though he never met you. 

My father and I don't agree on many things, but I know we agree on this point: our rights, as American citizens, are worthy of respect from soldiers and civilians alike. We should never take them for granted, or forget the sacrifices made to provide and protect them.  But the people who go to war to defend those rights have to earn respect, in the same way every other human being does:  not by insisting that it be given to them, and not by presuming they're entitled to it. They earn respect by being respectable people, regardless of what they've had to endure, and by acting respectfully toward others--including and especially those who hold opinions and beliefs they don't share.

Happy Veteran's Day to my dad, and to all the honorable men and women out there who gladly defend our right to disagree.