Following return from the European Theater after World War II, my primary thought as a veteran was to grasp the G.I.Bill of Rights and complete interrupted studies. As with most of the men with whom I'd served, there was little time to waste nurturing psychic wounds of battle -- move ahead, get on with life, put that war (as the civilians wanted us to) behind you. I joined no veterans' organizations, attended no battalion reunions or military observances, lost contact with all but a very few of closest combat comrades. If the phrase had as yet been coined, none of us had heard of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and dealt quietly, discretely, with whatever demons in flashback surfaced. The new life in a victorious, prosperous, confidently glorious America was to be embraced!
But it never goes away, that experience of soldering wars, and sooner or later one acknowledges the indelible brand of Veteran. It is most manifest in the instant recognition and bond you know with all veterans, frequently on first encounter recognizing that this stranger has been there, is one of us, shares the unfathomable alienation -- that impenetrable wall -- which exists between those who've looked on the carnage of battlegrounds and those who've not. Just this year, during travel abroad, another such instant: While seated on a bench overlooking a panoramic view of the Mediterranean, a white-haired gentleman on a cane unsteadily approached me. An American. I wasn't particularly surprised at his first words -- "you too, I assume, are a World War II vet."
In recent years, evaluating decades of a richly full life, I concede -- if rarely considered when younger -- that having soldiered infused my every other ordained persona: son, husband, father, professional, traveler. I supported the funding campaign for and attended the opening of the World War II Memorial on the Mall at Washington, DC. I am a Founding Member of the National World War II Museum, New Orleans; and of The National Museum of the United States Army, scheduled to open at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, June 2015. In on-going communication with the organization Paralyzed Veterans of America, I welcome the opportunity to extend them support.
This Veterans' Day (2011), I'll undoubtedly have word via e-mail from the one surviving member of my old outfit whom I know to be yet among us. He faithfully communicates on every national holiday or when personal news warrants it. If neither of us feel (or admit to being) anachronistic, I nevertheless savor a vanished America his brief words evoke -- a proud and progressive nation, world leader in the rebuilding of former enemies, democratically convinced of a bright future, idealistic and in many ways still innocent, globally respected as the liberator of conquered peoples. I'll remember, too, a tableau from a Veteran's Day Parade witnessed when a lad on the streets of Baltimore -- a slim, frail, whitened nonagenarian from the War Between the States in step beside a Doughboy from World War I. Never eradicated, could that glimpse etched in the mind of an impressionable small boy have possibly predicated a kinship which flowered in subsequent years?
