War stayed with them

He arrived at Parris Island on VJ Day. At one of the train stops on the way, a USO woman called out to the new recruits, “Y’all might as well go home, it’s all over.” When they mustered on the parade grounds, the Marine commander told them, “You may think the war is over, but there are Japs on all those islands and we still have to find them.” Decades later he told me about the recruit who pulled the rifle trigger with his toe because he just couldn’t take it anymore.

He never saw action outside the U.S. as a Marine. He graduated the Naval Academy, class of ’51, but now wearing glasses could no longer be a Marine. He won the Air Force lottery. He was soon on Guam and then to Korea, providing intelligence for a South African fighter group. A dark day when one of their number shot down a Marine fighter in a case of mistaken identity.

He was part of the team that put together the photos and information during the Cuban Missile Crisis. He battled with computer nerds who just could not seem to understand what the Air Force wanted the SR-71 to do. He volunteered for Vietnam, but with the arrival of a new child asked for a deferral to help care for her. He took his family to Guam where he ran the B-52 Operation Menu (breakfast, lunch, and dinner) for two years. Did Ken Burns mention it in his film? He then spent his year in Vietnam running operations Ken Burns did talk about. He chased the Viet Cong and decades later when he talked to me about what happened to those brave souls after the North Vietnamese pushed them aside, I thought he might shed a tear. He spent the rest of his career in the Cold War.

My dad’s not living anymore; he, like two others I knew, a Vietnam and a Korean vet, all took their lives. The things they knew, the things they saw, stayed with them for decades even though they had good lives, families and did great things for their communities. We have no idea what we make them give. BAUER DUKE Pine Bluff