War and My Father, R.I.P.

At 21 years old, my father witnessed the Armistice signing that took place on the deck of the USS Missouri on September 2, 1945. He viewed it from the deck of the navy destroyer USS Gatling, one of the many allied ships that sailed into Tokyo Bay to be present for the Japanese Surrender Ceremony. His assignments on the ship during the war had been as a crewmember in Engine Room #2 and as member of one of the gunner crews on the stern of the Gatling. I suppose operating one of the big guns (5"/38 caliber) on the very ship named after the guy who invented the machine gun should have provided some self-serving grounds for post-war discussion, but my father never talked about it. A few times we had pressed him about whether he had ever shot down any planes, but he would only shrug his shoulders. A quick google of the history of the USS Gatling during the time of his service suggests that he must have been involved in much active combat -- but like so many WWII vets, he just kept mum about such matters over the years. He reportedly once told a friend of his that he saw both atomic blasts, at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, from the deck of the Gatling (Wikipedia tells me that the ship was positioned off Guam on August 9, 1945 -- could it be possible to see the explosions that far away? I don't know about that story, especially since he never dropped that bombshell to his own nuclear family).

My father had a stroke last Wednesday and passed away that evening. His funeral was this past Monday. I do not intend this post to be a eulogy to him, or a ploy for sympathy. I will spare readers my welter of personal remembrances. Some might think it unseemly to blog publicly about a father's death at all, and such folks are entitled to their views and I might otherwise be inclined to agree with them. Yet when you sit graveside, next to your father's casket, and the American Legion Honor Guard presents your mother with the folded U.S. flag, and in unison salute in the direction of the casket, and then the lead Legionnaire proclaims that an entire nation thanks your father for his service, and then the rifles are shot several times into the air, and then the bugler plays taps, ever so plaintively, well, you start to think about war, it's hard not to, and you recall how vocal your father had been about this recent war, up to his very last day, his outspokenness a stark contrast to his longstanding reticence about the past war he fought in. Realizing that there was a prominent national and military dimension, not just a religious and family dimension to my father's funeral service, it occurred to me then and there that he'd want his expressed views on war to be known more widely. Thus this post. He was a quiet and private man in general, but let it be entered into the historical record, even in this small way, just one vet's perspective conveyed second-hand, that my father bitterly opposed this current war, from the outset of the war to basically his last breath. The news of every soldier's death in Iraq pained him profoundly, and the subject of those who had been wounded or maimed filled him with an almost unspeakable combination of sadness and anger. While he never outwardly celebrated WWII, he did display in his home, our childhood home, a picture of the USS Gatling -- and we knew implicitly that he was indeed proud of his service, service in the cause of a terrible but tragically necessary and therefore justified war. We didn't, however, have to surmise his current views. He was quick to condemn the invasion of Iraq and the subsequent occupation as unnecessary and unjustified, as never reaching a national mandate, a national call to arms, far from it. Over the course of his lifetime he probably voted Republican more often than Democratic, but he railed viciously, on a daily basis, against the Bush administration, because of the senselessness of the war. Theirs had become, in his eyes, a thoroughly corrupt administration, not just an inept one. I offer these parting views of a dead man not as an exercise in partisan politics, a tawdry way to score debating points. By now the war transcends petty party squabbling, who's right and who's wrong, or should, because an individual's death, the finality of such loss, is far too great a price to pay, unbearably so, when the cause is unworthy.

(Public thanks to American Legion Honor Guard Hanford Post #5 for its tribute to yet another veteran.)

(Unexpected thanks to Bill Maher, too: I learned, amidst all of the sharing of stories from friends and family, that my father in his later years especially enjoyed watching Bill Maher on TV.)