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Roberts: A generation of Americans, ordinary people like my dad, showed us what courage looks like.
It was the war of our parents and our grandparents. My dad was 16 years old, a boy in high school when the Japanese attacked a faraway place called Pearl Harbor. He was a skinny Mississippi kid more interested in sports scores than in the fate of the free world. Until Dec. 7, 1941. Like most fathers of those in my generation, he grew up quickly after that — graduating from valedictorian of his high school class to foot soldier in the Army’s 84th Infantry, the Railsplitters.
As soldiers go, he was nothing special, just another ordinary guy called upon to be extraordinary. One of millions in that most remarkable of generations that dug deep and found the courage to save the world. Then they came home to settle into ordinary lives.
My dad fought in the Battle of the Bulge but he never talked about the war — not to me anyway. It was only after he died in 2004 that I read some of his diary, the thoughts of a 19-year-old Eagle Scout seeing the white cliffs of Dover for the first time, then later seeing things far less picturesque.
“As I write this, in the distance through the fog and rain of the channel is France,” he wrote, in October 1944. “I wonder how many of us will live to see France fade into the distance as we return to the U.S. We are about a mile out and due to the rough sea, are forced to wait until tomorrow to disembark. There are ships as far as the eye can see waiting for the same thing...”
I reread the passage above this week, wondering what it was like on that long ago day for a teenager away from home for the first time, waiting to disembark into a world war. To follow a treacherous path paved with the blood of brave Americans who died at Pearl Harbor and at Midway and on a beach called Omaha.
It was only after Dad died that I appreciated the Bronze Star with the oak leaf, the one he kept in his sock drawer with the rest of the military hardware.
It was only then that I began to wonder, if called upon could I measure up? Could you? Despite evidence to the contrary — think social media and selfies — I like to think that we would. That America doesn’t need to become great again because at its essence, we already are. That when called upon to shake off our blinders and stand up to bullies and madmen, we will answer the call.
Oh, we may come late to the fight, and we certainly will make mistakes. My dad somehow managed to sink a tank. But in the end, we’ll get it right.
We, after all, are the sons and daughters and grandsons and granddaughters of World War II. Though we weren’t alive on that day of infamy, we, too, will never forget.
Today, I’m thinking of those 2,403 Americans who died that sunny Sunday morning that changed the course of a war and the world.
I’m thinking about my dad and about all the men and women in that generation and in every generation since who went willingly to war, so many of them never to return. And most extraordinary thing about them? They were ordinary Americans.