My father fought in two wars for an America we’re letting slip away

I’ve found myself wondering lately what my father would make of the goings-on in our country these days.

Though he never used the phrase himself, my dad was a fully qualified member of “the Greatest Generation.” His mother raised him on a bookkeeper’s salary in Philadelphia after his father died in the flu epidemic of 1918. He graduated from high school in the midst of the Great Depression. Going to college was never an option. He worked at various jobs, then, after recovering from tuberculosis, he volunteered for the U.S. Army right after Pearl Harbor. His military record shows that he was he was classified as an infantry sharpshooter during his basic training at Fort Bragg.

When I was well into my 20s I finally learned that he went on to fight in the infantry in the Battle of the Bulge, helped liberate a concentration camp, and was awarded a Silver Star while fighting in Germany. After the war ended he stayed in the active reserves and was called up again to fight in Korea.

Though he almost never talked about them, it was clear to me that his wartime experiences shaped him in many ways, for better and for worse. He would certainly drink far too much at times—probably self-medicating for PTSD. But I also have some quite pleasant pre-teen memories of hanging out with him in bars, usually in the middle of the day. And once in the early 1960’s, when he was driving on an expressway, a truck in front of us backfired and in what was still a reflex action he dived under the steering wheel. I had to reach over and grab the wheel briefly to keep us on the road.

On the positive side, his encounter with Nazism and its consequences seemed to give him a clear understanding of what he had been fighting for and what he had been fighting against. Having seen the realities of the Jim Crow South during his basic training, and then the discrimination against Black soldiers during the war, he had an instinctive understanding of the civil rights movement and an easy way of making friends with Black people.

He had the political views of an Eisenhower Republican, but his reaction to anti-Vietnam War flag burning was to say that he “didn’t fight two wars for any g.d. piece of cloth.” He never wanted to have anything to do with guns, and was skeptical of people who kept guns in their homes — almost certainly because he had killed many people with guns himself, and felt that pro-gun folks were posturing about something that they really didn’t understand.

So if my father was alive today, what would he say about an attempted armed kidnapping of one of our governors? About all the claims that our election results are going to be fraudulent? What would he say about our extreme levels of economic inequality – so very different from the 1950’s and 1960’s, when he was able to pull our family into the middle class even without a college degree. What would my father say about police continuing to beat and kill Black people? And what would he say about how no one is paying any attention to the plummeting life expectancy of rural working class white people, due to deaths of despair?

Then there’s the lack of response to the climate crisis, which is on track to destroy the futures of his grandchildren and great grandchildren. And the move to take away health care from millions of our most vulnerable citizens.

What would he say about all of this? Well unfortunately I can’t repeat here much of what I expect he would say. Sailors aren’t the only ones who know how to swear.

But I certainly can say that at his core he would be seriously disappointed and disheartened that in our deepening polarization we seem to be throwing away the freedom, the democracy, and the sense of belonging together and caring for each other that he risked his life to protect. In much of what is happening in our country today he would see images of the things he fought to defeat in World War II.

We need to reclaim the legacy of the good things my father’s generation fought for. If he were alive today, my father would say we need to wake up, get ourselves together, vote, and get to work making this the country he believed in. Because if we don’t, we’ll regret it. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of our lives.

This story was originally published October 26, 2020 at 1:00 AM with the headline "My father fought in two wars for an America we’re letting slip away."