What to Remember

Few things get to me on an emotional level like talking to WWII veterans about their wartime experiences. I spoke to three this week, including one Marine who lived through 41 days during the Battle on Iwo Jima. (History note: during "Operation Detachment" on Iwo Jima there were 26,000 American casualties, including 6,800 dead. Of the 22,000 Japanese soldiers entrenched on the island, nearly all died either from fighting or by ritual suicide.) Another veteran I spoke to had been a Navy ordnanceman who flew on missions to take photos of enemy territory. He was in a plane which flew 20,000 feet above the mushroom cloud to take photos after the bombing of Hiroshima.

Excerpts of the interviews are scheduled to be in a special section in the West Plains Daily Quill on May 21 for anyone who wants to read a bit more about their experiences.

My father was a veteran of WWII. He spent most of the war in relative safety in India in the Army Air Corps running the metal-working shop which repaired planes that had flown missions and been shot up. But even he had a horrible realization that he had been directly responsible for the deaths of other men. Like many veterans of his generation he never got over calling them "Japs," but he broke down in tears the one time he told me the story of going on a special detail to install guns on the fronts of planes to protect our pilots from the Japanese fighters. He read a story in an Army publication a few months after he'd done it that said "several Jap pilots had been killed" with the guns my dad and others had installed. He was proud he had been able to help protect the U.S. pilots, but the guilt of the deaths he felt responsible for was heavy on his heart nearly 70 years after the fact. In many ways, he felt he deserved no forgiveness from it.

My dad's brother James, who incidentally was my mother's first husband, was killed by a sniper at St. Lo, France shortly after D-Day. His brother Floyd received a Silver Star for bravery in Italy after running through enemy fire to save his unit after their radio had been destroyed and they had no way to communicate. To say that WWII was a time of honor, courage and grave loss to all sides is, of course, an understatement. It was for my family and it was for millions of others around the world. "You can't really explain it to civilians," said one of the 93-year-olds I interviewed this week.

Fast forward to 2013. On May 5 in my blog post I questioned the wisdom of arming school employees. Wondered what it might be doing to our national psyche. Dared to say it might be causing our kids to grow up in a culture of fear while taking a toll on what is beautiful and good about our country. I didn't say anything about curtailing individual gun rights in any way. That was not the point of my blog.

For the record, my personal belief: Any kind of gun control efforts are pointless. There are vast numbers of weapons and rounds of ammunition in this country, legal and otherwise. It is impossible to go back and un-ring the bell of nearly unlimited gun ownership, and I don't believe we should. My family has always owned guns and we always intend to. Furthermore, even if gun ownership was limited, it wouldn't matter. Guns aren't the problem and we're merely stirring up resentment and helping gun sales skyrocket with the constant political wrangling over them. It's what we do with guns, like maybe put them in the hands of school employees who are not law enforcement officers, that I see as the problem. It's the way a criminal or mentally unstable mind works which cannot be changed by trying to take guns out of the equation. It's that we have become a country of "us" versus "them" and half the time we don't even know who "they" are. There. Have I managed to offend my Liberal friends while at the same time still not getting through to my Conservative friends that I really don't want to see your guns taken away?

Back to the point at hand. When I recited the Pledge of Allegiance at the MSU-West Plains graduation ceremonies on Saturday morning tears came to my eyes when I said, "one nation under God, indivisible." The division in this country is heart-breaking. I thought of those who had fought and died to "save our way of life" just to see us now behave with so little civility, respect and love toward our fellow Americans. My dad's been gone three years now, but I can tell you, he was disappointed in the way we treat each other. I thought of part of the thread of comments after my blog about guns in schools.

A friend said the following: "I'd love to see you folk armed with hugs and love and sunshine facing down an active shooter. I plan to use you as human shields while returning fire. Namaste." 

This is an actual friend from high school, not someone who has requested a Facebook friendship because he is a friend of a friend, but a person I have admired and loved since we met. He made our debate coach angry all those years ago by writing on the chalkboard in our classroom a quote from 2nd-century Church Father Tertullian, "The blood of martyrs is the seed of the Church." He's always been what you might say quirky, but that he can now say something like what he said to me is baffling and appalling. Will he say he was trying to be funny? I doubt it. I think he meant it. But I don't think the men in my family who fought in WWII would be laughing even if it was meant to be a sick joke. I'm sure my mother wouldn't have thought it was funny.

Memorial Day, to remember those in the military who died while serving their country, is coming up. Here's what I suggest we remember. Remember how to treat other people. Remember how to be civil. Remember my Uncle Floyd who risked his own life to save the lives of his friends and fellow soldiers. Remember a guy who managed to survive a month on an island of pure hell where nearly 30,000 others weren't so lucky. Remember my uncle James who died in France, shot in the head by a sniper. He hadn't been able to give my mother a wedding ring when they got married because they couldn't afford it, but he had a wedding ring in his pocket when they found him which he planned to give her when he made it home. The wedding ring made its way to her, but he didn't. James and my mother already had three little girls. To honor his brother's memory, my father married his brother's widow to raise those girls as his own.

If we want to remember something on Memorial Day let's remember what honor means.