Memorial Day re-run: "A few good men & women" ('09)

On Memorial Day, I advise people to either thank a veteran or go right out and enlist.

I always opt to thank the vet.

I think I would be a terrific peacetime soldier, which is not unlike being a spouse in a productive marriage. Sure, there’s a lot of bitching and petty gripes, but the GIs realize we’re working for a greater good and soldier on. Adding kids to the equation makes the family unit like boot camp where the parents are the drill instructors and the young ‘uns are the green recruits.

And I think I’m good in that role, as is my wife, Col. Valerie.

But none of us can predict how we’d react under fire. Would I be hero or coward? I can’t handle the truth.

Like a lot of men, I’d like to be tested but I never felt the situational urge to put on the uniform like so many others have done.

I think I and the nation are weaker for it. I’m sure I could have benefited from a couple of years of service right out of high school. Imagine what kind of shape the country would be in if, instead of going straight to the college bars, guys like me had been conscripted to spend 18 months in the service of our country.

And I’m not even talking about overseas duty in hostile lands. I mean if at 18 we’d have done some basic boot camp and been dispersed to clean up the ghettos, to dig sewage projects in the Appalachians, or help distribute food and friendly company to the elderly.

It would have instilled a sense of national morality and the too often alien notion of what it feels like to do good for strangers.

But to enlist with the understanding that enemy fire will be trained on you takes another breed.

I like to think I’m like Albert Einstein -- and I doubt he’d ever reciprocate in any fashion -- in that we’re both what he called “rational pacifists.”

We don’t want to kill anybody. We believe reason can usually prevail and that war should be the last, least welcome option.

Rational pacifists saw sound reasons to engage in bloody all-out war with Hitler and the Taliban. We didn’t see it in the buildup to war with Iraq.

Yet, even in a war that many of us felt was misguided, hundreds of thousands of men and women, many righteously motivated by the attacks of 9/11, lined up to serve because they believe it’s their sacred duty.

The surfer dudes have practically neutered the powerful word’s original impact but, man, that’s awesome.

A few years ago I was once golfing with friends on Memorial Day and admitted to feeling sheepish that there we were skipping along in the sunshine, enjoying our favorite pastime, some beers and giggles, while men and women not too different from us were hunkered down in boiling bunkers in places like Baqubah and Jalalabad.

Despite being mired in two difficult wars, there was no homefront hardships in our little world.

My buddy Ronnie, himself an Army vet who’d served in Korea, gave a poignant response masked in a cheerful smile: “Hey, this is what they want us to be doing. This is why they serve.”

Well, that made me feel even more unworthy.

So those are some Memorial Day options for you to consider amidst the barbecue and the beers.

Either thank a vet or climb out of your lawn chair and go enlist.

Me, I think I’ll call Ronnie up and see if he wants to go golfing this week.

Guys like him are too humble to accept my thanks for what they’ve done on behalf of my country. It’s no big deal, they say.

That’s too bad.

It means I’ll probably have to give him strokes.

Alas, that’ll be the sad extent of my sacrifice on this Memorial Day.

Memorial Day thoughts on war & great war movies (from '13)

(701 words)

Being born with a philosophical bent, I spend a good deal of time wrestling with the great questions of the ages.

“Why are we here?” “What happens to us when we die?” And, “If God created heaven and earth, who created God?”

Those are all topics for another day.

Today, Memorial Day, I think I have an answer to a question that has puzzled great thinkers since it was first posed in 1970. The question?

“War: What is it good for?”

After much soul-searching I’ve come up with an answer. It is as follows:

Without war, there would be no great war movies.

I understand my answer is unlikely to salve the wounds of the veterans and widows for whom today means so much more than a traditional basic cable war movie feast.

I know of very few males, the gender primarily responsible for launching and fighting wars, for whom war movies do not resonate.

I wonder if the two are related.

But I know many men who today will be tuned in to watch, “Patton,” “The Guns of Navarone,” “Saving Private Ryan,” “The Longest Day,” and other epic films based on man’s inhumanity to man.

I think it’s because most men wonder how we’d react under fire. Would we flee or advance?  Would we respond like our fathers did?

In my case, the answer is probably yes.

Like many descendants of The Greatest Generation, I come from military stock. The declaration seems to be bestow me with reflected glory.

My Dad served. He stood on the bright line that helped save the world from tyranny.

Did he storm the beaches at Normandy? No.

Dad was a U.S. Navy chaplain’s assistant.

The only less hazardous military title I can imagine is Army Pillow Tester.

He had no war stories about heroics. In fact, my favorite war story of his was the one he told about he was waiting to board the U.S Pocono to be shipped off to the Pacific on August 7, 1945, when someone told him we’d dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima.

Dad’s question: “What’s an atom bomb?”

Military historians will argue the ethics of the point, but the atom bomb forced a swift Japanese surrender and likely saved the lives of my father and millions of others who would have perished invading an entrenched and motivated Japan.

We naturally tend today to memorialize only of the ones who fought on the front lines, the wounded and dead. In fact, the original intent of Memorial Day was the memorialize those killed in action. It has somehow morphed into an omnibus military appreciation day and I’m cool with that.

I tend to believe heroics are often the result of circumstance.

In that regard, I’m like the protagonist of what to me is the greatest war movie ever made, a war movie that shows not a single gun being fired and the only notable death is unseen, but merely mentioned in a letter read aloud.

It’s “Mister Roberts.”

The 1955 John Ford movie stars Henry Fonda as beleaguered Lt. Doug Roberts, the executive officer aboard the cargo supply ship Reluctant.

Roberts itches for action, but so excels at his mundane duties that his tyrannical captain, played by James Cagney, won’t approve his repeated requests for front line transfer.

In the end, his beloved crew secretly rigs the transfer and Roberts is thrust into combat.

The movie concludes with the bored crew getting two letters from Roberts’s new ship: the first is from Roberts who relates how his destroyer is in the thick of the action near Okinawa. 

In hindsight, he has an epiphany about his old shipmates and that the “unseen enemy of this terrible war is the boredom that eventually becomes a faith and, therefore, a terrible sort of suicide. I know now that the ones who refuse to surrender to it are the strongest of all.”

The second letter is from one of Roberts’s shipmates. It conveys Roberts was killed in a below-decks kamikaze strike. He was drinking coffee and never saw it coming.

Just another example of a sad, useless death in war’s grim ledger.

But, geez, it makes for one hell of a movie.

Related . . .

In a world awash in pix, Kodak not the only bankruptcy

Deer me, a story of venison & valor

Bee stung “vet” on Memorial Day

Encore! Happy Memorial Day!

I'm feeling just as lazy as I was last Memorial Day. So I'm re-posting the observations from 2011 Memorial Day. The sentiment still stand. Happy Memorial Day! If you can't thank a vet, say a prayer for one.

I’m giving into the warm inertia of holiday laziness by not posting a fresh Memorial Day story.

If you’re interested in reading one of those, you can do so here from 2009 (serious) or here from 2010 (silly).

But I just don’t have it in me today to conjure another one of those.

I feel sort of guilty about that.

Right now brave Americans are ducking bullets in some of the most inhospitable places on the planet. They are away from their heartsick families, their recreations and all the fat relaxing I intend to enjoy today.

They can’t play with their daughters or take them the new wave pool at Idlewild Amusement Park as I’ll be doing.

They can’t sit in a hammock and sip a beer, toke on a stogie, and listen to the Pirate game, which I have scheduled for the afternoon.

If they’re digging any holes in the ground, it won’t be to plant flowers and tomatoes and other vegetables like we’re going to do today as a family. No, if they’re doing any digging it’ll be for protective purposes.

They’re in hostile war zones fighting to protect my freedom of speech and I’m too lazy to even exercise it.

But I will take time to say my prayers and be sure to include ones that God will protect them, their families and all the men and women who’ve ever served so I can enjoy such a splendid little life in the greatest and most exuberant country the world’s ever known.

Thank you, vets. Happy Memorial Day.

Bee stung "vet" on Memorial Day

It is said that God never gives us more than we can handle. If that is so, then God must think I’m a sissy.

If He didn’t before, He sure does now.

Because on this Memorial Day weekend I’m seeking a Purple Heart from my golf buddies because of the round-ruining injury I sustained prior to Thursday’s afternoon hookie match.

I have a real spring in my step the days I’ve cleared for golf. I look forward to being out with my buddies in the sunshine, talking sports, drinking a few beers and trying to deploy a disruptive fart timed to coincide with an opponent’s backswing.

But I also want to play well. That’s why I was extra excited on Thursday. I’d played great the last time out. I’d putted well, was crisp around the greens and really stung the ball off the tee.

Now I feel bad for the ball. Because I know how much it hurts to get really stung.

Excepting self-inflicted hangovers, my life is so painfree that my body is confused when it’s surprised by the sensation.

That’s what happened as I was leaving my office to meet Ron in the parking lot. The ceiling light by the door has been broken for months so I couldn’t see the bee on the door knob.

Had I seen it, I doubt it would have registered anyway. I’d have likely dismissed seeing one relaxing on the door knob as an hallucination, and I welcome those breaks in reality’s tedium.

But there in the dark, I grasped the knob and it felt like someone evil took a pain-filled syringe and injected it into the tender webbing between my left thumb and index finger.

Ouch!

It hurt like hell, but mostly I felt stunned disbelief.

How was it part of God’s plan to ruin my round of golf by having my left hand bee stung? It was as confounding to me as why He’s wanted to keep me so poor for so long.

A bee sting made no sense. There in the dark, I thought maybe it was a metal splinter.

Either way, I couldn’t tell my golf buddies and had to freeze out the pain. We’re stoics when it comes to “feelings.” Any complaint is dismissed as a preemptive excuse for all the bad golf that’s bound to come one way or another.

It would be different if I golfed with women. They’d be sympathetic, coddle me and say things like, “There, there, baby. It’ll be all right.”

But golfing with women would radically alter the enjoyment of the day. Profanity would be frowned upon. Instead of sports, I’d have to talk about the kids and pretend I remember things like their names and their interests. As for farts, well, it would be out the window with that noxious mischief.

I encourage women to golf, just not with me.

I come by that chauvinism honestly. It’s the way Dad raised his boys. He said GOLF stood for: Gentleman Only, Ladies Forbidden.

Oddly, in his last year, he completely reversed that sporting misogyny and enjoyed golfing with women. I think the reason was the old man needed someone he could outdrive.

Either way, he must have realized his betrayal and a year after he began golfing with skirts, he did the honorable thing and just up and died.

I can’t say I felt like dying on Thursday, but I was clearly off my game. I hardly sipped a beer. Played lousy and came home early and sober. The pain I’d fought to ignore all day overcame me when I got home and saw the hand -- a golf glove had concealed it all day -- all red and swollen to the size of catcher’s mitt.

I’d found the spent, crunchy bee carcass right below the door know where it inflicted its last fatal act of menace.

When you think about it, the bee differs little from an Islamic terrorist. It gives its life to mindlessly kill something others love, in this case a day of golf and drinking.

And what motivates the worker bee? Maybe some fundamentalist bee cleric tells it a heaven awaits it where instead of it always serving the queen, a hive full of voluptuous virgin queens await to service it in bee paradise.

Odd, isn’t it, that I can take something as simple as a golfer being stung by a bee and equate it to the life-and-death struggle our brave soldiers face every day. On Memorial Day, no less.

Really, guys like me ought to just say thanks and then buzz off.

Thank you, vets.

More than a few good men (& women)

On Memorial Day, I advise people to either thank a veteran or go right out and enlist.

I always opt to thank the vet.

I think I would be a terrific peacetime soldier, which is not unlike being a spouse in a productive marriage. Sure, there’s a lot of bitching and petty gripes, but the GIs realize we’re working for a greater good and soldier on. Adding kids to the equation makes the family unit like boot camp where the parents are the drill instructors and the young ‘uns are the green recruits.

And I think I’m good in that role, as is my wife, Col. Valerie.

But none of us can predict how we’d react under fire. Would I be hero or coward? I can’t handle the truth.

Like a lot of men, I’d like to be tested but I never felt the situational urge to put on the uniform like so many others have done.

I think I and the nation are weaker for it. I’m sure I could have benefited from a couple of years of service right out of high school. Imagine what kind of shape the country would be in if, instead of going straight to the college bars, guys like me had been conscripted to spend 18 months in the service of our country.

And I’m not even talking about overseas duty in hostile lands. I mean if at 18 we’d have done some basic boot camp and been dispersed to clean up the ghettos, to dig sewage projects in the Appalachians, or help distribute food and friendly company to the elderly.

It would have instilled a sense of national morality and the too often alien notion of what it feels like to do good for strangers.

But to enlist with the understanding that enemy fire will be trained on you takes another breed.

I like to think I’m like Albert Einstein -- and I doubt he’d ever reciprocate in any fashion -- in that we’re both what he called “rational pacifists.”

We don’t want to kill anybody. We believe reason can usually prevail and that war should be the last, least welcome option.

Rational pacifists saw sound reasons to engage in bloody all-out war with Hitler and the Taliban. We didn’t see it in the buildup to war with Iraq. She’s mangling her defense of it but clearly someone was lying to Nancy Pelosi right along with the rest of us.

Yet, even in a war that many of us felt was misguided, hundreds of thousands of men and women, many righteously motivated by the attacks of 9/11, lined up to serve because they believe it’s their sacred duty.

The surfer dudes have practically neutered the powerful word’s original impact but, man, that’s awesome.

A few years ago I was once golfing with friends on Memorial Day and admitted to feeling sheepish that there we were skipping along in the sunshine, enjoying our favorite pastime, some beers and giggles, while men and women not too different from us were hunkered down in boiling bunkers in places like Baqubah and Jalalabad.

Despite being mired in two difficult wars, there was no homefront hardships in our little world.

My buddy Ronnie, himself an Army vet who’d served in Korea, gave a poignant response masked in a cheerful smile: “Hey, this is what they want us to be doing. This is why they serve.”

Well, that made me feel even more unworthy.

So those are some Memorial Day options for you to consider amidst the barbecue and the beers.

Either thank a vet or climb out of your lawn chair and go enlist.

Me, I think I’ll call Ronnie up and see if he wants to go golfing this week.

Guys like him are too humble to accept my thanks for what they’ve done on behalf of my country. It’s no big deal, they say.

That’s too bad.

It means I’ll probably have to give him strokes.

Alas, that’ll be the sad extent of my sacrifice on this Memorial Day.