Someone asked me that the other day. The answer is pretty easy, but its meaning escapes me. A veteran is someone who served in the military to protect our nation. A pretty simple statement but when you think about it, it hides great complexity. Among veterans I count my three brothers who each served in different branches. I am proud of them for that, but their lives are different from each other and from mine. It seems veterans are made up of people from all walks of life, different demographics, different belief systems, different politics, and have different ideals of nobility. The quintessence is that they serve. I want to speak of one veteran in particular, my father, someone who no longer lives but has left a legacy. His is a complicated life to speak of in my view. But as the son of a veteran who has done much. There remains much to say.
My father was an easy man to like, and difficult to love. His was a personality full of laughter but to those of us who knew him there was also harshness and anger. He was provocative to say the least and my main memory of him was his anger at the world. For years I thought that anger was simply a mean streak that he chose to develop. It wasn’t until the end of his life when he chose to speak with me that I realized there was more to him than what I knew, a depth that required understanding.
I wish I could say that all vets like my father were perfect men, that their sacrifice defines them as givers in this life. But we know that what drives these men and women is as varied as the people that exist. My father was very patriotic in his own way, but also very cynical of the patriotism he saw. I am not sure if what made him that way was his military service or his life, neither of which was cheaply bought, both of which were hard fought battles in their own right. Often the military is an escape of sorts, a change in a pattern that may be used to mold us into one thing or another. For some it is viewed as an escape from circumstance. Little do they realize that they do not escape the freight they carry with them.
My father's early life existed around two coal mining towns in Russell County and Dickenson County Virginia. Trammel and Dante are their names. Locals by the way will not call it Dante in terms of the Renaissance poet, they will refer to their town phonetically as "Daint". I know something of Dante, Trammel, and southwest Virginia, it can be a hard and harsh place filled with good people who have adapted to the harshness of the limestone and coal. There isn't much to draw one seeking out a life in Dante. Built in the rugged Appalachians it reflects a poverty we normally expect of the third world. There are old burnt out clapboard houses that sit on the edges of town. Men aged before their time with black lung on the rickety wooden front porches, rocking their chairs watching the cars and trains go by. Faces are drawn hard and tight by years living underground or winters that were warmed by the coal in potbellied stoves. Eyes are often clouded by the alcohol they have used to drown away the pain of a continued existence with no escape, or crushed hopes and horizons that will forever elude them. Most do not realize that cost in their lives before they are old and retired. They work from holiday to holiday.. deer season giving them respite in the beginning of fall, showing them signs that another year is passing. Lamentations as old as the bible are voiced through blue grass songs, and like the slaves of old; they endure. Their hands, when you shake them, are calloused and hard and their lungs, already weak from the coal, catch pneumonia easily from too much time in ankle deep water. The sides of the hills around Dante are 40 degrees steep and houses sit precariously upon them, their precariousness reflected in the income of miners whose lives depend on the coal they spend their existence removing from below. The community is poor, but its people stand ramrod straight and dare you to make light of their mismatched clothing and hand me downs. Some on welfare survive from check to check living in a temporary and to them shameful existence while their children are socially promoted in schools that have inadequate funding and parents too concerned with making rent to spend time making sure homework is done. The focus is on making it to the end of the month, not on which university or college they hope to attend. You have a lot going against you in Dante and there isn't much attention paid to this part of Virginia as the noble class of courtesans from DC gallantly suck up all the attention up North in Fairfax county. Dante is a place to be from, not a place you seek out. Believe it or not, my father's time was even more difficult and harder on the soul and life of an individual than what I saw there in my own youth.
His call to duty came in the death of friends in a coal mine and the very young but mature decision that life will drown him here and his escape had to be done then or never.
At 15 he was working in the mine loading coal in the McCoy mine at night while going to school during the day. A pony would come up to the top level and they would hand load the coal at night. This paid 1 – 2 dollars a night and all the coke and “nabs” they could drink and eat. McCoy owned a small store and his sons worked by my father's side. One night while he was working in the tunnels, a roof bolt collapsed and shives (splinters) pronounced "shiv's" from the wooden beams shot out and killed two of his friends. He knew it was bad, and in the end a similar fate awaited him too. So he tried to join the military at 15. He was a good size for his age, but the recruiter would have none of it. They went to the local school board for age verification, he was fifteen and that was the end of that. The maw of the mines waited for him. Except for him that wasn’t going to happen. His destiny would change, and he knew how. So he asked for a draft card under the pretense that he could show it to his friends. The recruiter saw no harm in it, after all, he wouldn’t be allowed to join until he was 18. So he got one. It was 1949 and the cards were hand written for the most part. Later that day he hopped a train to a city further away. By the following morning he was gone following a different path.
“I want to join” he told the recruiter.
“Well son, how old are you?” came the questioning reply.
“18”
“Do you have proof?”
“Here is my draft card”.
“OK son, sign here”…. And it was done.
He’d escaped to a better life, maybe.
He was signed up and sent to boot in Massachusetts. There he won soldier of the year at the base and was given a ticket to the World Series. At around his 16th birthday he hit the beaches of Inchon as part of MacArthur’s invasion of Korea. The water, he told me was to his chest and the mud on the beach was knee deep as he carried his BAR (Browning Automatic Rifle). The North Koreans were taken completely by surprise and they had made it inland a good 20 miles before there was any resistance. There he captured his first North Korean, an officer, and so sought to hand him over to a Major Forrester. The order was to have the Korean dig his own grave and then shoot him. Which my father promptly did; heck of a start to his 16th year.
So they moved forward, all the way to the Chosin Resevoir when the Chinese communist came in waves cutting them off and driving them back into pockets. He told me he remembered that it was colder than he had ever been in his life and people around him were felled as much by hypothermia as bullets. Nights were full of fear as the enemy would mass and prepare, the mornings were spent marching and calling in air support. During all of this he received his first wound. So at 16, while recovering he was sent back to be a desk sergeant and MP. He did not like it, nor has he ever liked authority.
He then skipped over and remembered Vietnam. He was one of the first advisors in Vietnam, an NDIC (non commissioned officer in charge) with a five man unit over various villages working with local militia against the Viet Cong. A Major Bear was in charge (called running bear because he hit the bunker running when a firefight or mortar fire began). His contact was a barefoot Vietnamese Lieutenant who was disciplined and warned him of eminent attacks. One indication - when 20 of the lieutenants men disappeared, they were told by Viet Cong family members that there would be an attack that night and not to go in. It was a crazy war.
My father told me of the Tet Offensive which started just as he was about to go on leave. He remembered trying to keep Major Bear calm who was running around with a bag of grenades and how my father fell as a bullet ricocheted off his belt. He mentioned working with PsyOps and nothing more, Vietnam taught him to love the grenade launcher and he was very accurate with it. There were numerous other fire fights he referred to, but did not speak of. Other things too, like the barber who shaved him with a straight razor turned out to be VC. He still smiles at that. Later he saw the man being led away even as the country slowly disintegrated, another casualty.
So he comes home, teaches counter insurgency for two years at Loyola University, wins ROTC shooting championships, finishes at Fort Gordon and after a tussle with a major (and revealing the lie of his age) finished the military demoted to Senior Master Sargent.
In the end though, he didn’t escape. There is something about the stark beauty of those hills that calls one back. I myself don’t want to go back, but sometimes when there is a crispness in the air, I can hear its siren song whispering. In the end he returned to the home of his youth, the Appalachian Hills and brought his German wife and children with him. There he raised us in effect as he was raised. We saw the poverty, we lived in it for a time (though like all children we didn’t know we were poor, we simply ran through the forests enjoying what was around us). He had spent years seeking an escape, but the mines called him back, and back he went. He was a union man; he loved the union and embraced it as did his father before him.
And so he finished and retired union. In the interim he divorced his wife, took on another, led a separate life, and moved on until he died. He was tough, he was mean but that toughness was an integral part of what he was; not only in the military where he had seen more fighting in more climates than most can imagine, but also in the harshness of his environment that raises such young men
He lies there now in those hills he so loved with the laurel and the deer that still creep to the graves of the family plot high in the wooded land. His struggles are over and he is done, having fought the hard fight. In the end there really isn’t a winner where this life is concerned, we do our eight hours and then punch our time clocks at the end of the day.
But the final question still remains. What is a vet? I can only look to my father in trying to answer that question. We praise these men and women on Veterans day, and we see them for one day as heroes. But like the ancient heroes of Greek history, they did great things as men and did them with the flaws of who they were. They fought, they died, and it is the sweat and blood of their sacrifices that make the cement that holds the walls which protect our society and keeps us from those who would destroy us. That is the true heroism. They are imperfect, and they do not want to be seen as gods or super men (or women). They served, their reasons are myriad, but in their time, they stood ready to risk all.
Maybe its not that complicated? Maybe it is the nobility of human nature coming through imperfect beings. My father did much in his life and while he never made the long service to his nation the centerpiece of who he was, nor demanded to be honored, he served. It was tough, it was gritty, it wasn’t pretty. It was like him, complicated and not.
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