Dad never said much about his service in the last World War. We knew some basics, that the Navy stationed him on a ship in the Pacific, but not much more.
Some details became apparent as the years passed. He had joined up at the end of his junior year in high school, which was how he came to be studying to earn his GED as I was about to enter junior high. It turned out he had refused to speak to my grandfather for a week, until those papers allowing enlistment by an underage volunteer had been signed. As Dad explained it, the greatest shame you could face in those days was for people to find out you had waited around to be drafted. It was a shame he refused to endure.
But he never told us any war stories. Other kids my age came to show and tell armed with their fathers’ souvenirs, a liberated Nazi flag and helmet stand out in my mind, but I had nothing.
When I was older, he related the one war story he ever told me. It is at least as instructive of the
kind of veterans who have so honorably served this nation, as any such tale I’ve ever heard.
Technically, it wasn’t even a war story, because it took place on V-J day. Dad and a few buddies from his ship were on some island, already enjoying shore leave, when word of the final victory reached them. Feeling the need to celebrate at a town on the other side of the island, they stumbled across a jeep they decided had been abandoned and was therefore available for requisition. Their ability to requisition this vehicle was impeded slightly, by the fact that whoever “abandoned” it had taken the extra time to padlock the stick shift to a hasp bolted through the dashboard. Dad, in the only display of mechanical aptitude he would exhibit in his entire life, realized they could unscrew the hasp from beneath the dashboard and mobility was theirs. |
 | | Colonel Theodore Roosevelt |
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No specifics were discussed, but my distinct impression is that this little joyride was greased by the kind of lubrication that would not have served well in a crankcase. The MPs they found themselves speaking with a few hours later concluded that “abandoned” was too liberal an interpretation of the official status of this vehicle, a conversation which put their celebration to an abrupt end.
There were repercussions. There was talk of brig time, but Captain Frank Thompson, who would return from war to serve many terms in Congress, decided this too harsh a punishment for his sailors and intervened. But the infraction demanded some punishment. For having devised this rather unmilitary requisition procedure, my father suffered the most severe penalty. He was broken in rank.
Dad, who was laughing the whole time he related this story, laughed hardest at this.
“The war was over and we were going home, what did we care what rank they gave us?”
They were what historian Stephen Ambrose calls citizen soldiers. Or, in the case of my father’s little band of joyful celebrants, citizen sailors. When their nation called them to serve they were prepared to answer. But on the day that war ended, they considered that service over. They just wanted to get back home to make their country a better place than the one they left a few years earlier.
History records other great nations, powers that dispatched swarms of warriors whose profession it was to plunder other lands. They joined armies and navies in search of wealth and triumph. Military service was their way to a better life.
What history will record about the United States of this era is that, at a point in time when it had the raw power to fulfill the dreams of warlords and their peoples from across the pages of history, and vanquish all others, it refused to do so. We have all heard the names of those would-be conquerors: Alexander, Genghis, Caesar, Napoleon - Hitler. Notice how only one name is required to identify those whose wake of passage spreads only terror. History teaches of conqueror peoples: the Golden Horde, Romans, Huns, Vikings, Conquistadors and even Britain of the 18th and 19th centuries - an Empire that proclaimed sneeringly to the world that the sun was unable to set on its boundaries!
For our country’s warriors, the route to a better life was found in finishing the job and getting back home. That is truly the finest part of their military tradition.
What our nation celebrates this Veteran’s Day is not military glory or victory in battle. We instead honor all those soldiers and sailors who just wanted to do their bit, then return to what they really did best, being citizens.
