This weekend is Memorial Day
weekend, and, as I out walking Grace, my thoughts turned to Dad. Though I have never thought of him as a
traditional military man, nevertheless, in the past few years I have thought
about his relationship to the military when this holiday has rolled
around. This morning, however, something
struck me that had never occurred to me before.
Perhaps it is because I am now looking at him from the vantage point of
someone who is 71 years old. I have
always known that Dad was in the Navy for twenty years. As a child, twenty years sounded like an
incredibly long time – a lifetime, really.
The thing that struck me this morning, though, was how terribly young
Dad was when he got out of the Navy after serving 20 years. He was only 38, Maya’s age!
Realizing
how young he was when he came out of the service was a jolt to me. Essentially, he had his whole life ahead of
him. It also put his life in a different
light for me. He was only 21 when he was
at Pearl Harbor and when he saw all of the
fighting from the ships. His tales of
being up in the Aleutian Islands (the foggiest place he had ever been) and in
Australia were really a young man’s tales. He was, in effect, much like those
young men who went away to Vietnam
or, how, to Iraq and Afghanistan,
and return, damaged, having witnessed the atrocities of war.
I bring
this up because it is commonplace now to hear of men (and now women) who return
to society and just cannot fit in and I wonder just how much psychological
damage was done to him. My first impulse
is to want to blame war and the military.
I want to ask the question, what kind of person would he have been, what
would he have made of himself, if the war had not come along.
There is a
list put out by Wicomico
High School honoring all
of its attendees who served in the military.
On that list are Dad and four of his five brothers – John, Robert,
Peyton, and Colvin. (Byers could not join because he was legally blind.) I’d always assumed that because Dad was the
second youngest of the boys in his family, he had joined the military because
it was a family tradition, but over the past few years in doing family
research, I’ve discovered that was the first in his immediate family to join
and, for me, that puts a different perspective on things.
I ask
myself, what kind of life Dad would have had if he had not joined the Navy and,
before I put too much blame on the military, I have to look at the
context. Dad was orphaned by the time he
was eleven. He grew up with unofficial
foster parents. The town that he lived
in was a backwater town of small time fishermen and farmers who were trying to
make a living in the wake of changes wrought by the Civil War. None of his
brothers seems to have prospered. Alcoholism was a family curse, several of his
brothers were childless or had unhappy marriages. One committed suicide. Given
those circumstances, would Dad have turned out any differently?
Still,
Dad’s foster father seems to have been involved in education. Dad graduated
valedictorian from his class and, according to what he told me when I was
young, got a year’s scholarship to attend William and Mary – something unheard
of in his family. I distantly recall Dad’s saying that he did not attend
college because even with the scholarship he could not have afforded it. Was
Dad really joining the Navy simply as an act of patriotism or was it because he
saw it as his way out of a life that the rest of his family seemed consigned
to? We’ll never know the answer.
What I do
realize now is how terribly young he was even after serving twenty years in the
Navy. I can only repeat the cliché, “He
had his whole life ahead of him.” But
really, did he? Given the background
that he had, the damage done to him by the war and military culture, and the fact
that he now had five children to support, what real choices did he have? Free will is basically a fiction. Once the machinery of life is in motion, it
has a force of its own. I doubt any of
us now are where, at eighteen, we thought we would be. Paths lead to other
paths and where our footsteps finally end is anyone’s guess.
