MY PARENTS, JEANETTE AND CALVIN BROWN, AFTER WWII.
(On Memorial Day, I'd like to remember my father, who, sixty years ago, valued what Republicans don't: children's lives over a hobby.)
My father grew up in the country, where as a boy he hunted and fished and went off by himself for days at a time on camping trips, living off the land.
At 17, Dad joined the Navy the week after Pearl Harbor was attacked by the Japanese -- all his friends volunteered for the service that week, along with his brother and one of his sisters.
Engineers go back in my father's family to the 1900s: the Navy taught Dad Electrical Engineering, and he became a ship's electrician.
They also trained him to be a Gunner's Mate, and Dad worked ship guns so large he developed some permanent hearing loss.
Dad received a commendation for shooting down a Nazi plane dive bombing his ship.
That commendation -- and five years at sea fighting from Africa to Italy, from the South Pacific to Iwo Jima -- came at a heavy price.
Including Dad's best friend killed next to him while landing troops in Italy, a ship sunk in the South Pacific -- and at age 23, in charge of a three-gunship flotilla at Iwo Jima, his lead ship disabled in the frontline of shelling.
Dad's ship was being towed back to Hawaii to ready it for the invasion of Japan when the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- and World War II was finally over for my father.
The Navy wanted to keep Dad, offered him promotions and prime posts: Hawaii, where the country boy from New Jersey had learned to surf.
But my father had had enough of war games. And although he never admitted it, suffered from what they then called Shell Shock -- what we know as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
According to my uncle, the first year Dad was back from the war, the family was worried they could still lose him.
Dad was hallucinating, drinking, fighting, totaled his car in an accident. His brother was a volunteer rescue worker called to that accident, convinced for long minutes that Dad had been killed.
My grandfather started a small home building company to get my father back to work.
Eventually, Dad married, built a house of his own, but refused work at the local government arsenal.
Instead went to work as an engineer in rocket engine testing (my father was, literally, a rocket scientist!)
Dad continued to hunt and fish with his friends. I remember venison stew, and dressed deer hanging in some neighbors' yards every fall (not ours, thank god.)
Then one day, my three-year-old sister and four-year old brother somehow got hold of Dad's Swiss Army knife out of the top drawer of his dresser (so far above their heads, that no one could figure out how they'd managed.)
They fought over the penknife and my sister's finger was nearly severed.
I remember the trail of blood drops down the hallway as my father scooped her up and drove her to the local hospital, where they managed to save her finger.
(A finger which has come in handy in her career as a doctor.)
The first thing back from the hospital, my father got rid of his hunting rifle -- even though it had been safely stored in the attic, with a door so far above our heads that as children we couldn't manage to pull it down.
But Dad sold that gun, or gave it to one of his friends.
This was 60 years ago, long before childproofing a home was the norm.
My father had been a lifelong hunter, but he'd seen what guns could do. And more important, my father valued his children's safety over a hobby.
It's a national disgrace that we, as Americans, allow gun hobbyists to create a situation in which our children die from guns they can't even use as hobbyist hunters: Weapons of war.
High-powered weapons of war -- used to hunt other Americans.
