70 Years Later...

A DAY TO REMEMBER...
I cannot let this day fade without recalling that this day, December 7, 2011, is the 70th anniversary of the attack by the Japanese Empire on our Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii - the attack that launched us into World War II. That conflict, both in Europe and in the Pacific, eventually took more than 400,000 American lives during the slightly more than three and a half years of conflict.

THE WAR
Some have said that World War II unified this country to the point that it became THE dominate power in the world from the end of the war in 1945 until, barely, the present date. The late writer and commentator on "60 Minutes", Andy Rooney (he passed away November 14th) covered World War II as a writer for the Stars and Stripes and reminded us of that time in his life frequently with his commentaries and his books.

PLEASE VISIT THESE SITES...
I've written extensively about this anniversary for several years - 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010. I hope you'll take the time to visit those entries to help you remember this date and what it meant to this nation - what we fought to defeat on two continents simultaneously.


THANKS TO THE "GREATEST GENERATION"
As the members of my parents generation - Tom Brokaw's "Greatest Generation" - continue to die off I hope you will take a moment to thank those you know for their sacrifice. Every member of American society sucked it up and did their part to help win the war, not just those brave men and women in the military service. My father, for example, was ineligible for military service because of a leg injury, but he worked two full-time jobs for the duration - his regular job and then at least one defense-related job. His brother served in the SeaBees and two uncles on my mother's side served with distinction as officers in the Army. They, and their peers, returned from doing their duty in the war to help build this nation following the war.

ABOUT TO DEPLOY
In five days my grandnephew, Nathan Harrison, will deploy to Afghanistan for his first tour. He joined the Army right out of high school last year specifically to help win that conflict. In less than two week, at the age of 19, he will find himself in harm's way in a far-off land doing his duty for this country. He is the kind of young man that formed the cadre of the soldiers, sailors and airmen in World War II - ready to defend our country's interests, wherever it took them.


NEVER FORGET
Never forget the lessons of Pearl Harbor and never stop supporting our troops. They deserve it.

Labor Day Festivities

HOW WE SPENT OUR HOLIDAY
I don't know how you spent your Labor Day holiday weekend, but let me share mine with you.My wife and I spent our holiday on the California Central Coast in a town so small that it isn't even a town, per se. No mayor or city council to drive you nuts with boneheaded decisions - only a community services district charged with keeping the water and sewers flowing, the trash picked up and fires fought.

LOCAL LIONS CLUB SPONSORS PINEDORADO
In this little burg of only 6,000 permanent residents there are two really big events each year - Independence Day and Labor Day. On the latter, this weekend, there is the annual Pinedorado celebration, sponsored by the local Lions Club. This time around the theme was "Home Town Heroes".


REMINISCENT OF THE FISH FRY OF YEARS PASTThis event is real small town Americana and reminds me very much of what the Costa Mesa Fish Fry and parade used to be when our town was much smaller. Pinedorado includes a parade Saturday morning which travels the entire length of the town in which you'll see service clubs on display, the football team riding on a flatbed truck, local school bands, local emergency responders and Shriners on minibikes.

HORSES...
We saw several mounted groups, including a couple of locally-bred Clydesdale horses pulling a wagon and the pastor of the local Presbyterian church aboard his beautiful paint stallion. And, since "stuff happens" the local Boy Scout troop manned the shovels to clean up behind the equine groups.







...AND HOT RODSAutomobile fans were treated to a flock of vintage Thunderbirds, a couple lonely Corvettes and a covey of Smart4Two cars. The automotive hit, though, was the Dodge Viper Sheriff's Cruiser used as the "pace car" for the event.

CLOWNS AND A "KELP BAND"
We also saw members of the local bicycling club, clowns on scooters, four companies of strong, enthusiastic, disciplined young people from the Grizzly Youth Academy and a group called the Krazy Kelptics - they played music using kelp as instruments! We even saw a flatbed truck loaded with "floozies" from a local bar. As I said, this is small town Americana.











PROUD MARINES
This year was an especially patriotic event. This year the 1st Marine Division Band from Camp Pendleton marched in the parade and gave a concert following the parade in the parking lot of the local Veterans Hall that was attended by hundreds of admirers in a standing-room only crowd. As I watched the band play I saw many a tear in eyes among those in the crowd.

"GREATEST GENERATION" HONOREDGrand Marshals for this year's event were more than two dozen local residents - members of Tom Brokaw's "Greatest Generation" - who either served in the military in World War II or performed as "Rosie the Riveter", supporting the troops at home. They were transported in the parade by huge military trucks and the Marine Band preceded them as an honor guard. You couldn't keep from feeling proud of those brave men and women who sacrificed so much for us all, and of those young Marines serving our country today.
THIS FAIRGROUNDS NOT FOR SALEThis little community has a "fairgrounds", just as Costa Mesa does, right in the center of town. However, there is absolutely no chance it will be put on the auction block to help balance the state budget. Nope, this "fairgrounds" is used only once each year - the Labor Day holiday weekend. It contains permanent little structures for ticket sales, booths for food sales and games and a little, teeny railroad for children to ride. The entire "fairgrounds" would fit nicely in the front parking lot at Costa Mesa City Hall. In the weeks before Pinedorado members of the Lions Club tighten nuts and bolts and slap a fresh coat of paint on everything so, as you sit and enjoy your Hearst Ranch beef or chicken, you'll be proud of your surroundings.

HOT ROD SHOW
Sunday, in the parking lot where the crowd assembled the day before to hear and cheer the Marine Band, there was a car show, where classic cars and hot rods from the area are put on display to jog memories of many of us who remembered the days when the cars were new and we were, too. This year that part of the event grew so much that they had to block off one of the main streets adjacent to the parking lot for the overflow entries. It was great!

NOW BACK TO REALITY
That's how we spent our weekend - mingling with happy, patriotic folks honoring my parent's generation for their selfless sacrifice to keep our country free. I hope you had a good time, too. Now, back to reality - there's a council meeting Tuesday requiring our attention.

MEMORIAL DAY - 2008

MEMORIAL DAY - WHAT DOES IT MEAN?
For many Americans the Memorial Day holiday means the official launch of summer. That extra day we tack onto the weekend today means that, under normal circumstances, tens of millions of Americans drive somewhere to enjoy the holiday. Few really take the time to contemplate what this holiday is all about.

JOE BELL'S COLUMN TODAY
This morning my friend and Daily Pilot columnist, Joe Bell, presents us with his take on Memorial Day, HERE. As usual, Joe does a great job of describing his recollections of "his war" and the reluctance of many who fought during WWII to tell their stories.

HEARING THE STORIES
Joe is right. The generation that fought and won WWII - Tom Brokaw's "Greatest Generation" - are leaving us at the rate of around 1,000 per day. The pool of human spirit that locked arms and fought to defend our country, and later built it into the dominant industrial and economic power in the world, will soon be gone and with them may go many untold stories of heroism, valor and sacrifice that the rest of us really do need to hear.

"MY WAR"
The same can be said for those who fought in "my war" - the Viet Nam Conflict. That war - yes, it was a war - cost us more than 58,000 young Americans and tore at the very fabric of our country for more than a decade. Unlike WWII, where most Americans pulled together to defeat the common enemy and later build our country, "Viet Nam" became a metaphor for derision and anger. The societal wounds opened by that war continue to fester to this day, more than thirty years following the end of hostilities.

PAINFUL MEMORIES
My peers who fought in that war have also been reluctant to talk about their experiences. The combination of the pure horror of war and the fact that the Viet Nam war was so unpopular have kept many of them mute over all these years.

MY COUSIN'S UNTOLD STORY
I have a cousin who is a couple years younger than me. He came to California from his home in the Midwest to attend school while I was in the Army in the mid-1960s. When my tour of service ended I returned home and, when the semester ended, he went back home to continue his education at Kent State University. As fate would have it, he was drafted and became an infantry soldier in Viet Nam. He survived his tour of service and went on with his life. Despite being part of a very supportive family, with three younger brothers and a sister, he never discussed his experiences in the war with anyone - not even his wife.

LETTING IT ALL OUT
Then, a few years ago, we traveled to his home for the marriage of his daughter. After all the turmoil that surrounds such an event was over and the kids were on their honeymoon my cousin and I sat at his kitchen table late one night, just kind of unwinding from the event, when he began taking about Viet Nam. Once he started talking it all just kind of poured out.

THREE PURPLE HEARTS
He spoke of the three purple hearts he received for wounds sustained in battle. He spoke of the near-misses he'd experienced beyond those three injuries. For example, as he and his platoon woke one morning to head out on patrol, one of his mates accidentally stepped on my cousin's glasses, which he had placed carefully beside the leg of his bunk. Although my cousin was willing to go on patrol without his glasses, his platoon sergeant refused to permit him to join them and he remained behind until a replacement pair could be sent from Saigon. That morning two dozen men left on patrol. None returned. They were caught in an ambush and slaughtered along a dark jungle trail.

DEADLY MISTAKES
In another incident my cousin was on patrol when one of his compatriots discovered an unexploded LAWS rocket. That's a projectile fired from a disposable, light-weight launcher that some American and South Vietnamese troops carried. His sergeant was furious about finding an unexploded round, blamed it on improper use of the weapon and told my cousin to pick it up and take it back with them to their camp where there would be a class about how to properly use it. My cousin refused because it was a "live" round and could explode any time. After a short argument the sergeant had another man bring it back with them.

LESSONS LEARNED THE HARD WAY
The next day one of my cousins mates came to fetch him for the class, which was to be held in a bunker within the compound. My cousin told his friend that he wasn't going anywhere near that thing because it was still a live round. As he said those words they heard an explosion. The round blew up and killed or severely wounded 17 soldiers, including the sergeant and their platoon leader.

THE HORROR OF WAR
Listening to his stories that late night at his kitchen table I realized that my cousin's experience in Viet Nam was very similar to that of the character Charlie Sheen portrayed in the movie, "Platoon".

STORIES YET TO BE TOLD
Those men, who served our country in an unpopular war, deserve our respect for their service, too. They deserve to have their stories heard. The young men and women who volunteer to serve this country today in distant venues, like Afghanistan and Iraq, also deserve respect for their service and sacrifice. They, too, have stories to tell. We need to listen to them and thank them for their service to our country.

A GRATEFUL NATION SAYS THANKS
Today, Memorial Day, 2008, would be a good time to begin that process.

Andy Rooney's Generation - The Greatest

REVISITING ROONEY
A little over a month ago, on March 16, 2008, I wrote an entry - which you can read again by sliding over and clicking on the March 2008 Archive on the right side of the page and scrolling down to it - which addressed My War, CBS commentator Andy Rooney's personal memoir of his time as a correspondent during World War II. When I wrote that entry I was having a tough time getting through it, even though it's far from a challenging read. I just kept getting mad at Rooney, so I'd put the book aside. Well, I finally finished it.

PORTRAYING WAR IS TOUGH
Within a couple pages of the end of his book Rooney talks about his impression that it is difficult to capture the real essence of a war in a book or movie. I'm going to quote several paragraphs from this thread of commentary exactly. Once you read it you'll understand why.

ROONEY'S WORDS:
One of the most dramatic educators has been Steven Spielberg. It surprised me that I'd ever think a commercial movie could do a good job showing people what any part of World War II was like and, in spite of my reservations about Schindler's List, the 1998 movie Saving Private Ryan did that for a great many Americans who might otherwise never have known.

I admired Saving Private Ryan more than I enjoyed it. Being reminded of bad times in your life is not my idea of a good time. It is common knowledge that many Americans who fought in Viet Nam were psychologically damaged for life. The terror of it returns to them in nightmares. But the common perception is that most of the soldiers who fought in Europe seem to have suffered somewhat less of that kind of cerebral damage. It had never occurred to me that there were any ghosts in my own attic until I sat there watching Spielberg's movie.

At the end of the unrelentingly horrible scenes of the Normandy Invasion there was a change of pace, a lull. I don't cry in sad movies but at that point in the movie I began to sob. I was rational enough to try to understand what was making me do it, but I could neither understand nor stop. It was another example of the heart knowing something that the brain does not.

In retrospect it was apparent that there must be a storehouse in some hidden corner of my brain that contains fragments of my memory of a hundred friends who were killed. Private Ryan evoked those. I went home thinking about all the friends I never saw again... all the good guys who never had the chance to live the good life I'm living.

The movie is remarkably accurate in both historical and visual detail. after seeing it, I telephoned my friend Al Smith, Major General Al Smith, Jr., in Tucson. As a captain, Al led a battalion of the Sixteenth Infantry Regiment of the First Division ashore that day. There are only a handful of men alive who saw what Al saw on June 6, 1944. He had also been moved to tears.

"My wife looked at me as we left the theater," Al told me, "and said 'I don't know what to say.'" After living with Al every day of her life for the previous fifty-five years, she got a better idea of what he had gone through from seeing Saving Private Ryan than she had from anything he had ever told her.

ROONEY'S RIGHT
I have to agree with Rooney on his observation. I suspect he would have been similarly moved by the HBO series, A Band of Brothers - produced by Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg - which followed Easy Company through their years in World War II, except it was produced after Rooney's book had been published.

I'M A BIG MOVIE FAN
Now, I have to tell you right here that I'm a big movie fan. I see a lot of films during the year - I have ever since I would walk down to the local theater and spend ten cents to see 10 cartoons, two serials and a western on Saturdays. My favorites include a couple of John Wayne epics, Stagecoach and The Searchers, most Indiana Jones movies, Henry Fonda's Twelve Angry Men and - right at the top - Saving Private Ryan.

"RYAN" AT THE TOP
When I say "right at the top", that means that I've seen the complete movie more than a dozen times and big chunks of it nearly as many times. I saw it at the Big Newport theater the first night it was released ten years ago and four more times during that run. The first night was the most memorable - not for the movie itself, but for what I observed during that presentation and immediately afterward.

OPENING OBSERVATIONS
I went to an afternoon presentation, which was populated by mostly older couples - folks who could have been my parents age. I found myself thinking that many of the men in the audience certainly had been in World War II. The couples smiled, laughed and talked as they found their seats and began munching popcorn.

EMOTIONS
During the movie, following that horrible first twenty minutes that portrayed the Normandy Landing, I, too, heard muffled sobbing in the theater, some of which obviously came from men in the audience.

FARAWAY STARES
When the movie ended and the credits rolled there was just silence, punctuated by sniffs and some sobbing, as the theme by John Williams just reached right in and pulled your heart out of your chest. My wife and I left our seats and, as I surreptitiously wiped the tears off my cheeks, moved out into and through the lobby to the patio at the front of the theater where I watched the older men and women as they made their way out. Most of the men had a kind of far away stare on their faces and their wives clung to their arms tightly - I'm not sure which was holding the other up at that point. There was very little conversation among the couples - just an almost reverent silence as they slowly made their way to their cars. News reporters hovered around the older couples, trying to get comments from the men as they left the theater. Many were so choked up they couldn't speak.

LUMP IN MY THROAT
Personally, I had never before, and have never since, been so moved by a film as I was by Saving Private Ryan. Even today, at the end of the movie as I watch the James Ryan character as an older man, standing beside the grave of Captain Miller, ask his wife if he led a life worthy of the sacrifice made to bring him home I get a huge lump in my throat - just as I have now as I type this line.

ROONEY'S WRONG
In his book Andy Rooney opines that he thinks Tom Brokaw, in his book The Greatest Generation, got it wrong. As indicated by the title of his book, Brokaw postulates that our World War II generation was, in fact, the greatest - that subsequent generations wouldn't have "the stuff" to pull through a similar war. Rooney thinks otherwise - that the current generation has what it takes to act similarly under the same circumstances. I'm not so sure.

DIFFERENT TIMES
We live in very different times than those in which my parents and their peers struggled. They were born at the end of World War I and were young adults whose metal was tempered during the great depression of the 1930s. They understood sacrifice. Today many young people of similar age feel their world is ending if they lose a cell signal. Today we express anguish because just over 4,000 American men and women have lost their lives fighting in the Middle East over the past four years. My parents generation lost more than 450,000 young men in the same period of time, decimating a generation of Americans.

DIFFERENT PEOPLE
Today I wonder if 10% of our young adults - 16 to 30 - could rise and sing the Star Spangled Banner accurately. My parents generation began enlisting in the armed forces beginning on December 8, 1941 by the tens of thousands each day - ready to do their patriotic duty to defend our country and our very way of life. Heck, many of their children - my generation - headed for Canada during the Viet Nam conflict. Different people, different times.

THANKS TO ANDY AND ALL THE REST
So, even though Andy Rooney made me angry as I read his book, I'm grateful to him for re-kindling my appreciation for the sacrifice he and his generation made for us. The Greatest Generation is leaving us at a rate of more than 1,000 per day now. If you have not done so recently, seek out your friends and relatives who fought to defend this country and those who remained behind to keep the home fires burning. Listen to their stories and thank them for their efforts. They deserve it.