The Day After Veterans Day

It used to be called Armistice Day, and celebrated peace ...

I wanted to post something about my dad again for Veterans Day but didn't get the chance. Now it occurs to me there's something symbolic about celebrating a bit late.

Have a look at this dashing young army officer. Dad posed in front of the League of Nations building in Geneva, Switzerland, where he got to go on leave immediately after the end of World War II. Seems the picture of youthful health doesn't he? But the photo lies. This vacation was purchased at the expense of putting his body in harm's way and having it punctured by a bullet. Not to mention the rest of the horrors he had managed to live through.

His wound was treated, and it healed. The pain went away except that it ached in certain kinds of weather. But there was scar tissue in one of his lungs that made him susceptible to chest colds. Ten years after the war he spent two weeks in the hospital with pneumonia in the middle of a Miami summer. He recovered, but would come down with bronchitis every winter like clockwork. One of the things I knew him by as a child was his cough, so familiar to me that I can still hear it.

He got in the habit of treating himself with penicillin pills that a friend who worked at the VA hospital got for him. It's possible that by doing this he created his very own drug resistant strain of pneumonia. The disease hit him again at the age of 50, and this time it failed to respond to treatment. So you could say that he died from his wound 30 years after it had been inflicted.

This national holiday was originally called Armistice Day to commemorate the end of the First World War, "the war to end all wars." It was to celebrate a peace which was supposed to be kept by the newly formed League of Nations. Sad to say, the League failed largely because the United States did not join. So there we have my father visiting its mortal remains in Geneva, the tomb of a dream of world peace, with the blood and ashes of another war fresh upon him.

In his too short life he saw other wars from the home front -- Korea, the Cold War, Vietnam, and a list of other "military interventions" too small to be dignified by being named. Armistice Day has become Veterans Day, and increasingly celebrates not just the sacrifices of soldiers, but the so-called glory of their achievements. The day comes wrapped in flags as well as wreaths and flowers. Misty-eyed we are supposed to march to the drum into the future, endlessly supplying new bodies eager for the grave.

But as our new crop of wounded veterans grows, we should attend to the hurt, and keep that foremost in our minds. We know now that pretty much everyone returns wounded from war, and that the effects last a lifetime. Brain damage, suicides, addictions, and homelessness are as much a result of military service as death in battle, and often harder for families to deal with.

When will there really be a war to end them all? Probably not unless there is a war that puts an end to everything, which was always the threat in the Cold War. But there could be a peace to end all war. And if that should ever happen we will really have an Armistice to commemorate.

Another Veterans Day

More memories of a vanished former soldier ...

As I've said before, my thoughts on Veterans Day often turn to my father, who served in World War II. What I'm remembering this year is how little he ever spoke about the war. Like many vets from that era, when he came home he seemed determined to close the door on the ugly past. His intention was to protect his family from the horrors he had seen by keeping them to himself, and his hopes were for a peaceful future where his son would never have to go to war.

I can only imagine the distress he must have felt when the Cold War with the Soviet Union immediately emerged from the ashes of the hot one fought with Germany and Japan. He'd only been home for a few years and had just started a family when the Korean War broke out. For several years he lived with the idea that he might be called back into active service if things got bad enough -- and they seemed to be getting pretty bad.

Then the rest transpired … the H-bomb surpassed the A-bomb by a factor of a thousand … the Rosenbergs were executed for nuclear espionage … Joe McCarthy got everyone looking for Communists … Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles shortened the early warning of nuclear war from hours to minutes … Civil Defense put air-raid sirens everywhere and tested them each Sunday, religiously … bomb testing put radioactive fallout into the air and the milk consumed by a generation of children, even in mothers’ milk … American and Russian tanks faced off in Berlin … the Wall went up … and the whole thing nearly blew up around us when the Russians put nuclear missiles in Cuba, just a few hundred miles from our Miami home, and we found ourselves surrounded by an army preparing to invade the island.

Through it all my Dad never wavered from his conviction that war was a bad idea and had to be put to an end. Each new crisis in current events only stregthened his belief in the senselessness of armed conflict, the idiocy of politicians who relied upon it, the crime that it was to send young men out to kill and be killed. The prospect of nuclear holocost made the whole picture abundantly clear – the history of warfare led inevitable to the final cataclysm that would destroy all of humankind.

The final insult to him was to find yet another war, the one in Vietnam, emerging just in time to lay claim to the life of his only son. So you will understand why he supported me when I claimed exemption from the draft as a conscientious objector. For me, I felt I was only following what he had taught me. When I was a child playing with toy soldiers he had said, “If you want to make them look realistic you should have them all lying in a puddle of blood.” I had heard him reading an anti-war poem to my mother in which he described seeing a tank back up over the head of a soldier who was hiding behind it, crushing it like an egg. And I remembered how the poem ended, with its bitter admonition:

Drape the hallowed bunting on the poor deluded slob’s eternal bed … 

Safe old men, cheer them on, tear in eye, drink in hand.

So Dad wrote me a letter to present to the draft board, along with the ones from my school principal and a minister. He came with me on the day of my hearing, and had to cool his heels in the waiting room until I was done. The board declined to see him or listen to him, and I’m sorry, because when we left he told me through clenched teeth, “I was ready to give them such a piece of my mind.”

I would love to have seen that.

The Conscientious Objector

On Veterans Day, let's remember that they also serve who do not fight ...

The most courageous man in the history of warfare may be someone you never heard of. I certainly had never heard of him until I discovered the excellent documentary film called simply The Conscientious Objector.

That's right, Desmond T. Doss was a Conscientious Objector during World War II, and the acts of bravery he performed in his service as a combat medic made him the only C.O. ever to be awarded the Medal of Honor.

To really get this story you should visit the website desmonddoss.com, or better yet, see the film, which is available through Netflix. Director Terry Benedict has done a magnificent job of telling the story with quiet emotional power, easily rivaling the best work of Ken Burns. He filmed extensive interviews with Doss just a few years before his death in 2006. He also filmed other friends and survivors who had served with him, and even got a few of them to accompany Doss on a visit to Okinawa, back to the very ground they had struggled to take from the Japanese near the end of the war.

The short version of this tale is that Doss was a Seventh Day Adventist with an aversion to violence that dated back to his childhood, when a dispute between his father and uncle put him in mind of Cain killing Abel -- a story he had never been able to comprehend. "How could a brother do such a thing?" he wondered. From the day he had to hide his father's pistol he swore he would never again touch a weapon. And he never did.

When WWII came along he was offered a deferment on religious grounds, but declined. Instead he volunteered to serve as what he called "a conscientious co-operator." He thought he could be a medic and help to save lives instead of taking them. But though the army accepted him they did not accept his conditions. His commanders expected him to take weapons training and to carry a sidearm once he was in the field, medic or not. Time and again he refused even to touch a gun it if was handed to him.

Almost more problematic was his effort to honor his chosen Sabbath every Saturday, when according to his precepts he was not supposed to work. Sometimes he was allowed and sometimes he wasn't. Always he had to pay, in having to do all the worst jobs on Sundays, and in the derision of his fellow soldiers. Once he was threatened with a court martial, but by then he had an established precedent in his record, a tacit agreement that his beliefs were to be honored, and that he would not have to carry arms.

Everything changed when Doss's unit finally went into action in the South Pacific. He quickly came to be known as the man who would never leave a wounded soldier untended, regardless of the risk to his own safety. This behavior culminated at "Hacksaw Ridge," the highest ground on the island of Okinawa, where horrific fighting went on for day after day.

When an all-out assault left only about one third of his unit able to retreat under their own power, Doss stayed behind with the dead and wounded atop the plateau. One by one he found the survivors, dressed their wounds as best he could, and dragged them single-handed for as much as a hundred yards or more to the edge of the cliff, where he finally lowered them by rope to those waiting down below. He continued this for twelve hours, under constant fire from the enemy. Praying the whole time, he said that he kept repeating, "Just let me get one more, Lord," and when he had done that, "Just one more ..." In the end he had personally rescued 75 of them.

But he wasn't done yet. In subsequent action he was severely wounded himself -- and even then it was in the act of throwing aside a grenade before it exploded, saving more lives. After spending five hours waiting for stretcher bearers to carry him off the field, he gave up his stretcher to a more seriously wounded man. Then he was hit again. This time he made a splint for his own shattered left arm from a rifle butt and crawled to safety, finally saving himself.

I'm getting choked up again just remembering all this. Some of the other guys in his unit, the same ones who had been saved by Doss after earlier ridiculing him, were feeling the same way. A Bronze or Silver Star was not enough for this man. They submitted his name for the Medal of Honor.

Harry Truman, who awarded the medal in a newsreel of the time, is supposed to have said this was a greater honor to him than becoming President. Doss was headline news, a genuine and unprecedented kind of hero. There was even a comic book version of his story, which became the inspiration for director Benedict's making of the film many years later.

Alas, honoring the hero is one thing, and caring for him is another. Doss was 100% disabled as the result of his service. Besides his damaged arm, and legs filled with shrapnel, he lost a lung to tuberculosis contracted in Okinawa. Then the army doctors made things worse by giving him an overdose of antibiotics that left him completely deaf. At the time of the documentary, in 2002, he could only hear somewhat with the aid of a cochlear implant.

For years he declined offers from Hollywood to make movies about him. He preferred to live out his days in peace and quiet on his small farm in the backwoods. Over time he was all but forgotten. But it's not too late to remember him now.

Desmond T. Doss. A man who simply lived his simple faith, and made it count.

My Father, the Veteran

I tend to think of my dad at least once every Veteran's Day.

He came of age after World War II had already started. His mother decided her boys were not going to wait to be drafted, so she drove him down to the recruiting office to sign up. Thus, at the tender age of 18, a dreamy student who wanted to be a classical pianist became part of the US 4th Armored Infantry Division. Of above average intelligence, he was offered a chance to go to Officer's Candidate School after basic training. By the time he came out as a new second lieutenant, the D-Day invasion had already happened. He crossed the Atlantic on a troop ship stuffed with soldiers. Years later he told me how seasick he'd been from the pitching of the ship, and how he finally found a perch high up where, hiding behind a metal wall, he couldn't see anything but the sky, which made it seem as if they weren't moving around so much.

His unit went into France and Belgium, where they ended up on the fringes of the famed Battle of the Bulge, the last great German offensive of the war. He lived through many horrible experiences during the short space of a few months of intensive action. Once he was nearly killed when an artillery shell landed right behind him, knocking him flat on his face and sending a piece of shrapnel through his backpack, belt, and overcoat, and stopping just short of his skin.

Another time the convoy he was in, winding around hills in the dark, came under fire. They shot back for half an hour before discovering it was the head of their own column that had mistaken them for the enemy.

Finally, one cold winter night while they were firing blindly into the dark in a snowstorm, a single bullet finally found him, punching him in the chest and knocking him down. Men around him shouted "medic!" and "the lieutenant's hit!" but all my dad said was, "Oh my God, my forty-dollar coat!" As an officer, he had to buy his own clothes, and he had just obtained a new overcoat for the winter.

That was the end of his war. His lung had collapsed and he lost a lot of blood, but he pulled through okay. The rest of his time in Europe was spent convalescing. After the war was over he even got to do some sightseeing on leave, visiting Switzerland and Italy as well as France and Germany. By the time I knew him, his wound was an old scar--a small one on his chest near the right shoulder, a larger one on his back from the exit.

But there were other wounds. His faith had been shattered by seeing what supposedly Christian people were doing to each other in war. Combined with his study of philosophy when he went to college, the experience led him to leave the Catholic church and to become an agnostic, if not atheistic, seeker.

He was also politically disillusioned. Aware that the US had committed atrocities every bit as abhorrent as those of its enemies (the fire bombings of Dresden, most cities in Japan, and the perhaps needless nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as prominent examples), he wondered what the war had accomplished. Fascism may have been defeated overseas, but he saw it rearing its ugly head here at home in the form of the Rosenberg executions, the McCarthy hearings, and the increasing imperialism of American foreign policy. If the aim of the war had been to make our future safer, then it had failed. Instead we were living under a permanent threat of nuclear destruction more horrible than anything that had gone before.

His college education had been postponed, and even though he managed to pick up where he left off, attending Columbia University and the Julliard music school on the GI Bill, some degree of focus and drive had left him. He married his wartime sweetheart, started a family, and left New York to begin a new life in Miami.

But the new life eluded him. It became a struggle of survival as he moved from one menial job to the next ... sales clerk, postal worker, milk delivery man, nurse's aide at the Veterans Hospital. My mom went to work to bring in more money. Things were always tough between them. When I was twelve they separated, then divorced.

Eventually Dad found a career in botany through Fairchild Tropical Garden, where he worked until his death in 1974. He even went back to college at the University of Miami and got a degree in botany, graduating cum laude at the age of 38. It was never a lucrative thing to do, but he seemed to find some peace and contentment there among the lush tropical vegetation.

His old wound only hurt in certain kinds of weather, but he suffered from chronic bronchial infections for the rest of his life, and twice developed pneumonia. The second time the disease refused to respond to treatment. He died, you might say belatedly, from complications as a result of military service. He was 50 years old.