In Memory of the Fallen Useful and Heroes
"It’s good news week, someone dropped a bomb somewhere contaminating atmosphere, and blackening the sky." Remember that wonderfully upbeat song from the Sixties. Probably not the kind of thang to be thinking about on Memorial Day Weekend. After all, this is when we remember our fallen heroes, those who gave their lives -- their last full measure of devotion, Lincoln called it — in the name of their country. Curious thing is happening. As we continue to plow through new decades of what becomes history, the number of our number who have actually fought in a war is rapidly dwindling.
My father is at the end of his mid-Seventies; he was in the Second World War, the last good war. I was born five years after the war ended. A student at Harvard, my father enlisted and was sent to Europe as a cryptographer. He and a bunch of other eggheads were given the job of monitoring and interpreting German radio traffic. They were useful but not heroic. Once when the fighting got particularly close, their captain told them, Men, if the enemy gets too close, I’m going to have to kill you. His men took turns staying awake in case the enemy got too close and they’d have to shoot the captain.
My father might have been a hero if the Army were run by people promoted for clear thinking instead of longevity and obeisance. He and his group were near Bastogne in December of 1944. They interpreted the patterns of German radio traffic to mean that a full-scale assault was imminent. But their higher-ups refused to listen to them, because it conflicted with the thinking — and we use the term advisedly — of the generals. So my father and his people went to the two other army groups in the area, who also ignored them. What came next was referred to as The Battle of the Bulge. If they had listened to my father, the war in Europe might have been over earlier, and fewer families would be missing fathers and grandfathers today.
My friend Ray DeVoe, a Wall Street analyst writes frequently in metaphor. In one essay, Ray wrote about how your stockbroker can be right or wrong, for either right or wrong reasons. As an example of being wrong for the right reasons, Ray talked about a sociology professor in Australia in the early 1930's who looked at world events and predicted a global conflagration. He searched for a place which had no political or military significance where he might wait out the war.
Well, of course the fellow was right about the Second World War, but the spot he chose to hide out was Guadalcanal. This jungle island in the Solomons was really of no use to anyone except that the Japanese occupied the islands, and the U.S. decided to push them out. Guadalcanal was the scene of some of the worst fighting of the war, of any war.
It is a good thing that we’re running out of veterans. People who no longer have the memories of those horrible days and nights in frozen, mind-numbing foxholes in Belgium or steaming, skin-rotting trenches in the South Pacific. May we soon find another way to resolve our issues.
And that’s SetonnoteS...I’m Tony Seton.