(updated with new title)
My Dad landed on the beach at Normandy on June 7, 1944, Day Two of the great invasion. I remember him telling what it felt like coming in from England by boat, the smell of kippered herring for breakfast, the sound of artillery echoing across the water, then landing in hell. Lying on the sand, he almost lost his life when a bullet grazed his helmet. One of his buddies never made it off that beach.
I was born in 1946. My parents and I lived in a tiny little apartment in central Massachusetts as they got their lives sorted out. During his time in Normandy, my Dad, bless him, found himself shooting dice one evening with his friends, made seven straight passes, took the cash to the Quartermaster and had a check cut to send home to my Mom. When she got it, she thought the decimal point was in the wrong place. With help from his mother for the down payment, my parents used his crap game winnings to buy a small farm in the rolling hills near Sturbridge, Massachusetts.
It was a beautiful place for a small child. My Mom would take me into the vegetable garden and I would sit and watch spiders spin their webs while I ate sun-warmed strawberries, smelling the fresh green fragrance of the hay as my Dad mowed it. My Dad and I would walk through the pasture to the woods and fill jugs with fresh spring water that tasted so much better than what came out of the tap. There were geese and chickens, and two big-eyed Jersey cows named Esmerelda and Mehitabel. My parents had two Boxer dogs, Dawn, tan and with the sweetest disposition, and Boots, a big, brindled boy with white feet and an air of nobility. Soon there was a litter of puppies, each named after characters in Wagnerian operas: Wotan, Brunhilde, Tristan.... There was always classical music playing on the victrola and my favorite was Hayden's Surprise Symphony. Steamy summer Sundays would find us all out on the lawn watching goldfinches that looked like moving dandelions as they scuffled for food in the grass. We'd listen to the Red Sox play -- Dom DiMaggio, Birdie Tebbets, Ted Williams, Jimmy Piersall, Mel Parnell, and Dinah Shore singing about seeing the USA in your Chevrolet -- as my Mom shelled peas and my Dad treated himself to an ice cold Narragansett lager.
My Dad would get up each morning and milk the cows while my Mom collected and washed the eggs. Then he would pack it all into the little three window coupe and drop them off to customers on his way to college. School was funded by the G.I. Bill and, along with what we made from eggs and milk, he had his veteran's benefits. We lived comfortably on $80 a month. We grew much of our own food and our needs were simple. It was a very happy time in my life.
So when I read Brandon Friedman's diary today at http://www.dailykos.com/... it made my heart hurt -- both in anger and in sorrow. But then, as I sat with this, I thought, well, at least I can feel my heart. I'm not at all certain this is the case with some of the people in our government who are setting such miserly policy toward our veterans now. Their blindness and narrowness is staggering to me. And it is one of my great hopes that the regime change so badly needed in this country will come to pass, and that other families of veterans who endured so much will have the advantages that mine did, and that the children in those families will have the same kind of beautiful memories that sustain me now in these difficult times.