May 30, 2022

On this Memorial Day, I honor my father with a tribute I wrote back in 2014.

It’ s hard to imagine when the people we've known as mom and dad were young. Dad died at 91, on Father's Day in 2012, frail and worn out with the years. Mom lasted another eight years, passing into the arms of Jesus a month after her 98th birthday. Mom kept the photo albums of dad when he was in basic training, pictures taken of him with his Army buddies. Dad was scheduled to be deployed in the European theater during the war, but a routine physical detected a heart murmur that kept him stateside while his buddies went over the pond, some of them never to return.

One day about thirty years ago when mom and dad were visiting on Memorial Day, he and I happened to be watching a movie on the Turner Classic Movies channel. It was "The Fighting Sullivans," a film about the five Sullivan brothers who were stationed on the USS light cruiser Juneau in the Pacific. The ship was torpedoed during the action at Guadalcanal, and all five of the brothers were lost, along with 682 other sailors. As we watched the movie, I became aware of a snorting sound off to my side. I turned and saw my father in near total meltdown, sobbing like a little child. When I questioned him, he told me of boyhood friends who served and never came home. It was fifty years after the war, and as fresh as the day he first received news of his friends' deaths. 

I've talked with other vets, one who had been a crewman of a WWII bomber that was shot down in Europe and became a POW in Germany. I asked him one day about how it affected him. He came home, raised a family, became a successful local businessman, and even mayor of our little village. He told me of nights when his wife would wake him up to stop his thrashing around from the nightmares he had thirty years hence. 

We are more aware of the tragic effects of PTSD than people knew back then. Everyone then knew ex-soldiers who became alcoholics, abusive, suicidal, but no one seemed to make the connections until Vietnam. Now we are seeing (mostly) men coming home with injuries from which they would have died even thirty years ago to a VA system fraught with fraud and incompetence.  

Today we remember and honor those soldiers who never had the chance to live, raise families, enjoy the peace they fought to preserve. My father came home, leaving many of his youthful friends behind. I am grateful he lived a full life, and honor the other fine men never had the privilege to know because their sacrifice was as Lincoln said, “the last full measure of devotion,” men who answered the call of duty and served, bequeathing to us through their blood, sweat, and tears the freedoms we enjoy today. It is a gift easily squandered; may we instead value and guard it for the treasure it truly is.