A short Veterans Day diary.
I’m just off the phone with my 96-year-old father. He spends his winters down near Brownsville, Texas. He is a decorated veteran of World War II, having been wounded during his time in Patton’s army, crossing through France and southern Germany during the spring of 1945, helping to liberate the Dachau camp along the way. It was a horrific experience that he, so typically, has rarely talked about—but a bit more so, and more openly, in recent years.
At the retirement/snowbird community where he lives in the winter, they have a gathering for veterans on Veterans Day. He skipped it again this year. He despises war, and any form of its glorification. He has scant tolerance for anyone speaking from public platforms about the nature of war. His attitude is: “I don’t need anyone to tell me what war is like. I saw enough of it.” Tonight he said, “I sometimes want to say, ‘What was it again that I fought for in the 1940s?’ No one remembers anymore.” I assured him that many remember. I told him, “Sometimes people only remember something when they need to remember it.” He said, “That’s good. I’ll have to think that one over.”
And then he said, “Yet, you know, I have to say, if the circumstances were what they were in the 1940s, I’d do it again.”
My father is no nationalist, and in facing its evils, he had his life turned upside down—and all of us in the family felt the ripple effects as well. He has had his flaws, like all of us. But he is a patriot, in an unassuming, skeptical, knowing, and somewhat bemused manner. He follows the news closely. “Maybe the worm is turning,” he added tonight, commenting on the elections and today’s news headlines from France.
It has never felt right to say “Thank you for your service” to my father. So I will just say, I am grateful for my father’s sense of responsibility and duty, and his unwillingness to forget what he was fighting for.