Yesterday we put flags on my Uncle Jim's grave, who went from island -hopping in the south Pacific in 1943 to SP school and guarding the gates at Hanford, where some of his Uncles' farms had been taken for mysterious purpose, and Uncle Chuck, who started by busing tables at the NonComs mess in Bremerton, used his CCC experience to join the SeaBees, build runways in the Sleutians and later the Solomons, also ended up as a SP for awhile and shows up in pictures of the trials at Nurnberg, moved from the Navy to the Airforce and was in Korea running Radar, both during the Police Action and after, and then in Viet Nam, when his active service got terminated by a mine under his Jeep; retired as a Lt. Col.
And Ron, a neighbor for generations, who was in one of the earliest infantry units into Viet Nam and came home and never quite got his life right and died young.
Today, weather and joint pain willing, we'll go to the Olympia Cemetary and there will already be a flag on Dad's grave; he went into the Army in early 1941 and was a Corporal by Pearl Harbor, in a truck company mostly made up of Texans and Oklahomans: they hit the beach in Normandy about the eighth of June, 1944, and drove fuel and ammunition to the front line troops sounth as far as Paris and then North, through the Bulge, into Holland and Germany, horrors and hazards all the way.
And I will worry about Cousin Nathan, on his fourth tour at Bagram, and Tommy, in an Marine Rifle company about due to come home, and the young men I do not know whose cars and trucks and motorcycles pass my driveway at 4am on their way to roll call at JBLM.
And yet I know my Grandmother, a pacifist Quaker who saw the best of her sons go off to war, and Ron's parents who kew he was fragile but saw him drafted anyway, my paternal grandparents who needed the money my Dad's enlistment bought, and my great-grandmother who thought there had to be a better way: all of them were veterans too, in their own way.
"There's never been a good war or a bad peace" is a diplomat's statement (Benjamin Franklin, to be precise) "War is Hell" is a soldier's (Sherman, who created his own brand of Hell). For the troops in the field and the families at home, the words are less glib: for them, war is a daily presence, fifty years, sixty years after it's over.
