Thank you for your service to this great nation! For my Veterans Day movie this year I have A Bridge Too Far in the Blu-ray player tonight. Back in the day the Allied High Command drew a lot of criticism over this one. Mostly the usual, not moving fast enough, missing a great opportunity, etc, etc. Vision over the rear of the donkey being what it is, many voices called for heads to roll from the comfort of distance. We served though, and each of us knows that the movement of modern armies takes place in just short of forever time. The German general in the movie sums it up rather nicely, "We are retreating faster than they can advance." Cornelius Ryan's great book tells the story well too. The man on the ground pays the price for mistakes made at the HQ. Seldom do we hear of the planners and plotters suffering the effects of shell shock, combat fatigue, or PTSD, whichever flavor of distress your generation faced in their day, and endures even now.
I grew up the way many did in my generation. The war in Vietnam played on the television for our parents, safely distant from my young mind. The Korean War or police action sat comfortably forgotten too recent for the history books but too far in the past for news media. The war to read about, watch in movies, and play out in the back yard was the great one, WWII. Good guys (us) and the bad guys (them). The good guys won and the bad guys lost, what did those veterans have but pride? Ticker tape parades, kissing girls on the streets and beaches, that was the life of glory for the warrior. Flopping over snowdrifts in our large back yard, I remember holding my 'rifle', an aluminum baseball bat held backward-like, and taking down hordes of the evil enemy. Of course, the warmth and dry clothes of the house sat only a few yards away. No dreadful winter march with comrades dropping in the cold, never to rise again in many cases. I wonder today how many faces of the dead and dying haunt the dreams of that generation. I suspect they look on my childhood war fantasies with something like horror. Maybe and maybe not, it is hard to tell what a warrior of a bygone day might think.
My neighbor is a vet from that war. His stories are not quite so comfortable as they come out a bit at a time. As far as I know, he did not fall into that percentage of us who suffer the PTSD. However, as he relates the tale of a Jap kamikaze flying into an ammo ship as his destroyer stood off to save itself, I can see that the memory is as clear to him as my presence in his kitchen. On second thought, I might take fuzzy second place in that vision. A trailing ship in the convoy was too close when the ammo ship blew up, and his destroyer returned to pick up survivors. There were no bodies to see from the ammo ship. His story got me to thinking about jobs in the military. What devotion to duty lived in the hearts of sailors assigned to ammo ships? Did the crew suffer unusually high desertion, get extra pay? Look out for those sailors at the liberty port!
On this day we honor the real us, not that imaginary soldier who went in the house when his clothes were wet and the snow a little too cold, but those of us who served where we got assigned in the great lottery of the military service. Some saw combat face to face with the enemy, others from a bit further back. Some of us served in the Middle East, others in the Far East; some in cold or heat, humidity or tongue-swelling dryness, and some far back from the fighting. An ammo ship probably stayed far back from the ragged edge of the front, but phew, how many quarts of sweat did those sailors lose every time an unidentified plane flew overhead? What other necessary and inglorious, unglamorous jobs did other soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, and the many other personnel of the military efforts perform back in the day?
I can answer for one, me! Every other day, I marched around from latrine to latrine with my swizzle stick, an engineer's stake, pulled out the cut-off barrels from 'down under' and burned off the shit to ash. Yup, that's me, Bucky, not-so-glorious war hero on the Beirut front, doing the job no one else quite found it necessary to trade for. As the bootest of the battery, the lot fell to me to assume the position of field sanitation engineer. I can tell you these 30 years later that it is dreadfully tough to ignite diesel fuel with a match. A bit of mogas (gasoline) on top does the job much better, but be sure to keep those eyebrows back at a safe distance. The mogas also served to stop the dropping of lit cigarette butts into the barrels after one of the gun bunnies treated 'Petey and the Twins' to an accidental barbecue one night. The job took all day as each gun platoon had a 3-holer and the Seabees had a facility of their own. I trudged quite a few miles over those three months between, um, duty stations as the barrels burned and I stirred the flaming mixture to assure complete combustion. I thought I deserved a medal for this duty, maybe a little gold toilet seat or something.
Years later, I came to realize that this duty may have kept me safe from snipers. Bullets don't grow on trees, evidence in Lebanon to the contrary, and how many snipers worth the title would waste one on the shitter private? I don't seem to recall any of my great war games back in the yard including this sort of thing though. Real war is not often portrayed very well in the movies, though some are closer than others. The duties that keep the army moving forward or cleaned up in the firebase may not gain the recognition in the movies of glory, but we appreciate those jobs as only veterans do for each other. Appreciation, I think, helps much to alleviate the mental distress all parts of combat cause in those who serve. Those who cry over too many medals and awards for a military action probably have never seen the front, or the backside.
Semper Fi, Bucky