A Memorial to Extraordinary People

As we prepare to celebrate Memorial Day next Monday, it brings to mind one of my favorite holiday memories.

It involves a former work associate who had come to Louisville, Kentucky (where we then lived) the weekend of Memorial Day. He was there to accompany his father to a World War II reunion.

Ironically, we didn’t connect while he was in town, though we saw each other regularly when I was in the Atlanta area. I traveled there for an annual writers conference at the agency where he worked.

On a phone call soon after his Louisville visit, he chuckled about his father’s contemporaries, especially how obedient the old soldiers were to the commander that weekend.

“Whatever he said to do, they listened,” he told me. “But watching these guys, I wondered: How did we win the war?”

Average Folks

Picture for illustration purposes only.

He didn’t make that comment in a spirit of meanness. It was an appraisal of men and women who may have been valiant soldiers but were just average folks.

I could relate. I put my father in the same category: an average man who performed extraordinary service when his country called.

My father came of age during the Great Depression. Within a couple years of the 1929 stock market crash that touched it off, Dad and his younger brother would wander down to the railroad yards in Minneapolis. There, they threw rocks at the engineers, in hopes the trainmen would throw coal back. They would scoop up the black gold and take it home for heat.

Times were tough. So tough that, despite his family’s innate resistance to accepting government assistance, after graduating from high school he spent a year working in a Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) camp.

Though not as well-known as the Works Progress Administration which built the high school football stadium in my hometown, the CCC did a lot. For example, its workers planted more than 2.3 billion trees to combat soil erosion and restore forests, and built 126,000 miles of roads and trails.

Somehow, after that year with the CCC, Dad scraped together tuition money to enroll at the University of Minnesota in 1940. Halfway into his college career, the Army came calling with a draft notice.

My father advanced to the rank of second lieutenant before his military career came to an end on a hillside in Italy. A gunshot damaged his left knee so badly he had to be carried from the battlefield on a stretcher.

Back home, he went for treatment at a VA hospital. A doctor ripped the stitches out too early, leaving him with a deep scar in his leg. It also left the lower part, from the knee down, shriveled up. He walked with a limp the rest of his life.

Still Dangerous

Picture for illustration purposes only.

Dad was one of approximately 16 million men and women who fought for the U.S. in World War II. Making the ultimate sacrifice, more than 400,000 of them died in battle. Another 671,000 were wounded.

Because of their service, those of us who grew up in the second half of the 20th century did so as free Americans rather than German or Japanese serfs. For that, we can be eternally grateful, not just on Memorial Day.

Nor has the threat ended. I remember growing up thinking, “If the Soviet Union weren’t around, we’d be a lot safer.”

Well, it’s been nearly 35 years since the Soviet Union imploded, and things are more dangerous than ever. So to all those soldiers who keep us safe today, a hearty salute.