Thank you for your service
Dear M,
I don’t say thank you for your service to men in veterans’ hats because it feels corny, but I like to ask them what they did in service and sometimes I get a great war story out of it.
I’m not always so lucky. Other times they’ll tell me they never left Fort Lewis and were in charge of munitions, or training — things that fighting can’t go without, and which are just as essential as fighting itself. But these lack the raw emotional punch that, say, a man gets when he follows a tank into France and gets shot in the leg. And you can see a bit of shame in their eyes when you find out they haven't seen combat.
I still think they deserve something: there’s no shame in guarding one part of a wall when another part gets the action. You may not have proved yourself a good soldier, but you put yourself out there, and were willing to find out, and that deserves some respect too. I just don’t think it deserves the same thing as somebody who lost squadmates*. Maybe thank you for your service is the bare minimum then; and we throw it out because we feel like we have to do something, and the real payment comes when your grandkids are sitting on your lap, and you have their complete attention, and they wish they can be as manly as you someday.
My dad, probably one of the humblest men I know, was in Vietnam on a ship — a guided missile destroyer called the USS Buchanan (DDG-14). One of his jobs was firing the guns, and he hit tanks in motion, and he probably killed scores of commies. But he knew men who were in the thick of the jungle, who were overrun by the Viet-Cong and screamed for help over the radio and never got it and were never seen again.
My dad was shot at, and had shells and such flying over his head, and lost one of his shipmates he’d stood watch with. His ship was even hit only days after he left it. But he never wears a veteran’s hat because he doesn’t feel like he did that much. He says people who look the enemy in the eyes deserve to wear the hats and he doesn’t. He knows too many men who did and lost way more than he did; and he feels himself more a star to their sun, and hides himself so they can shine — a stance I don’t think he needs to take, but which is a credit to him all the same.
So you thank some men for what they did. But you get a look inside a man’s soul, sometimes, and see something really true, and wise, and masculine, and you have to thank him for what he is.
Yours,
-J
P.S. Reading David Hackworth’s About Face makes me wonder why we don’t talk about the Korean War like we talk about World War 2 and Vietnam. From what I can tell, there are several good reasons.
First is the fact that it came right after World War 2, and it lacked both the size and the horror of it. Second is that we were fighting for a people too foreign to really feel for. They didn’t look like us or talk like us or really share any history with us; and seeing their bombed-out cities, which never looked like London or even Dresden, couldn’t have the same effect as hearing another French town was blown to bits.
Third is the fact the fact that we didn’t win it like World War 2, and, in fact, we couldn’t have. The stories Hackworth tells about the Chinese invasion, and watching a virtual ocean of commies pour over the hills, many times largely unarmed, and still melt our machine guns through pure attrition, shows what we were up against; and the fear of getting into a war with communist China, which could ultimately become a war with Soviet Russia, was a very real danger, and one we didn’t feel like we were ready for. And we weren’t.
Not only because our allies weren’t on their feet yet, but because Russia had nuclear weapons, and at that time two nuclear powers had never had a standoff. In fact I think Korea was the first really modern war where the threat of an eventual nuclear standoff was totally possible; and so “winning” in the sense that we won World War 2, with the Germans waving a white flag and us doing whatever we wanted to them, was something we would never see again, at least until Desert Storm.
Vietnam was different. It was like Korea in several big ways, but we talk about Vietnam because we didn’t have the stomach for it, so we were mad about it. Since China and Russia were next door there was no victory in sight to rally the conservatives. There was no threat of invasion, either, to terrify the apathetic. And since the war looked pointless to many on the left, who didn’t think communism was all bad, this “pointless failure” only helped to radicalize the peaceniks — many of which were in movies, and magazines, and music.
Simply put, we had entered a new phase where large powers used little countries to fight over big ideas; and both sides poured men and arms and money into these hell-holes hoping to see the other side break first. It was widespread devastation at great expense on public TV. And it eventually started to feel bad.
Desert Storm was different. Britain had set Iraq in motion, given it a name, and a government, and we sold it weapons. And when the time came to invade they weren’t allied with a nuclear China or Russia or even anybody like Iran. So we bulldozed them quickly, and nobody talks about Desert Storm much either, because it was Goliath smashing David — too easy, too unfair, and too fast. Even the anti-war artists didn’t have the time or the interest to turn it into Vietnam. The subject matter was all there, but Saddam was too obviously rotten to victimize him, and the US was too powerful to glorify us.
Now that we’re getting into Ukraine we’re seeing the same pattern as Korea and Vietnam. Russia has nukes but it’s not interested in using them. Nukes are the things that keep people from going too far against you; not the first option in an attack. Ukraine isn’t officially allied with anybody like NATO, so Russia is throwing everything at them conventionally. We’re doing the same thing, except we haven’t thrown any people at them yet. Where this war will go is anybody’s guess, but unless a counter-attack invades Russian territory, I think the nukes will stay off the table, and that we’re in for a long slog — which could last many years, and will probably end in a stalemate.
This brings me back to the original point of this essay. I think part of the reason I don’t say thank you for your service is because many of our boys aren’t guarding the wall. Every war since World War 2 has been either guarding someone else’s wall or blowing it to bits — and when they're blowing it to bits, it's usually a much smaller wall than ours, and we bulldoze right through it.
Our own wall (on the other hand) is wide open on purpose, and it gets invaded every day by hundreds of drug dealers and child traffickers and rapers and gang members we could have shot. And these invaders march into swing states where Democrats won’t ask them for an ID at the voting booth. This week I learned that a coach in Tennessee went to jail for drugging and raping a whole slew of boys. We found out later that he was an illegal, so he never made national news. Our boys could have kept him in Mexico, but they were busy out there planting rainbow flags and killing patriots in Syria. So maybe you did serve. But the question is what did you do, and for whom?
*Maybe I sound like an ass, but why did you do it? and how much did it cost you? are questions we all ask when praise is involved; and if we don't, praise loses all meaning. For instance, maybe you beat up the school bully. Great work — but are you a younger student, or are you just a bigger bully? And maybe you only gave a dollar to the church. But (as Jesus puts it) are you a millionaire, or was it your last dollar?
Still, there’s a rationale for giving our veterans a participation trophy. If the threat of imminent foreign invasion would make every soldier a hero, why not take that stance now? They’re the only reason we haven’t been bulldozed by another army. The lack of a direct threat doesn’t nix the glory — the glory gets obscured by the scaring off of direct threats.
Now a fun and loosely-related veteran side-story.
My dad used to work in the 90's with an old Filipino. For the sake of his privacy we’ll call him Eustacio.
Eustacio was much older than my dad, and had been a technician working with the Navy for decades. But the fact that he’d been a technician for so long was weird; and in fact, by all chances he shouldn’t have been one.
Not that he lacked the talent: he’d just been trained by the Navy to work on machinery when Filipinos weren’t allowed to do much of anything in the Navy. By the time Eustacio had gotten into the Navy he’d already been a combat veteran since sometime around 12 years of age. He didn’t have much choice in the fighting, since the Japanese had invaded the Philippines and threatened his family; so he picked up a gun and went into the jungle, under what official terms I’m not sure.
How many people he killed is also beyond me, as he wasn’t available for comment; but he told my dad that at one point he was patrolling through the jungle and ran into a Japanese soldier face-to-face, and both of them were so scared that they screamed and each ran away from the other. Eustacio said he encountered that same man later, when the man was lying dead, having been shot to pieces.
He also said they were attacked by the Japanese at some point while they were off-guard — a lightning strike that forced him and his fellow soldiers to run with whatever they had. For his commanding officer that meant running butt-naked, and Eustacio said he remembered laughing hard as he ran for his life.
This fighting led him eventually into the U.S. Navy, under what circumstances I’m not sure, since both he and my dad both said Filipinos, at the time, couldn’t serve as anything more than stewards. Anyway, one day there was a big meeting between the admiral and a number of big wigs and they were sitting down for dinner; and Eustacio was bringing them another course, and as he approached the captain, the captain passed gas loudly — and apparently with great embarrassment. But before anyone could point fingers, Eustacio took the initiative and said my apologies, sir; a loyal and quick-witted move that instantly endeared him to the captain.
The captain was so moved by Eustacio’s loyalty that later he pulled him aside and said, you pick whatever you want to do. Just name it. I’ll make it happen. And Eustacio said he wanted to be a technician. So the captain made sure he went to school for it, and decades later he was working alongside my dad in Southern California.
How much of this story is accurate? I can’t say, but this was related to me thirty years after it was related to my dad, in the span of fifteen minutes over Thanksgiving drinks. I published it here because if I didn’t say it, I doubt any of my friends would ever hear of him at all.