When my father was a child his parents scraped and saved and were finally able to buy a farm in the Willamette Valley of Oregon. It wasn’t much of a farm, the soil was poor and rocky, but with hard work and careful crop rotation the little family got by and were eventually able to make the farm into something. This was just before the US entry into WWII and the Army decided that they wanted to create a base in that part of Oregon so the Army took my Grandparents farm. They paid them of course, but they only paid them what they had paid for the farm years earlier. Nothing for the hard work, the carefully planned crop rotations to amend the soil, the sweat, the blood, the love that a farmer expends on the land. My father watched helplessly while all of that was taken from his family by the Army. Cast out, homeless, and unemployed, the little family would have to start again. He saw his father’s shame and his mother’s desperation. My father hated the Army.
A few short years later Dad would graduate from High School and like all young men of that time he was drafted into the Army, the very Army he hated, cannon fodder for the battlefields of WWII. By this time the war effort was well underway and nearly everyone and everything was being ground through the gears of the war machine. My father was herded onto a troop train already full from it’s trip north through California. The trip lasted for days as the train swept up every able bodied young man along the I-5 corridor eventually disgorging them into rough wooden barracks at Fort Lewis. I remember my Dad pointing them out to me once as we passed by on the highway. I wondered why he had never said anything about them before. Why had he chosen to drive past in silence, alone with his memories? It seems silence is a common trait of the veteran.
In those days Basic training was just that, Basic. They marched and shot and crawled through the mud with the Sergeants yelling at them just enough so later the actual war wouldn’t seem so bad. Basic was awful, confusing, disorienting and Dad hated it, he hated everything about it. After a few short weeks they would re-board the troop train this time headed south and to war.
Dad would eventually board a troopship to the Pacific and he would serve the war as an orderly at a hospital in the Philippines. He was a grunt. He would mop up blood or change bandages or do a thousand other things common to a hospital and then the next day or later that night he would find himself on patrol packing a rifle into the unknown of a Philippine jungle. He never knew which it would be, treating wounds or making wounds, saving lives or...I don’t know. I never asked, he never said. Silence again.
Dad’s stories of the war were few and short on detail but the overall sense I got was one of confusion. He never knew what was coming next or why. How is this the way the world solves its problems? Why was that bomb dropped there? Why is this hill important? Why is this what I have to eat? What makes that man right and that man wrong? Why is that man dead and I am alive? Why?
My father’s story is not one of glory or conquest, it is a story of service and of sacrifice. He served the very Army that stripped him of his childhood home, he served an Army which he considered irrational and autocratic, he served an Army he hated for a country he loved. He served for a greater good all the while seeing nothing good right in front of him. His story is of blood and misery, death and injury and confusion. His was a story of war.
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