Thank you to all our veterans who have served our country with honor and self-sacrifice, even when derided by the very persons whom you have defended.
In November, Catholics remember and pray for the faithful departed every day, so it is very meaningful to me that both Veterans Day and Thanksgiving fall in November. Today I am remembering my father and his two younger brothers who all served in WW II. For various reasons, I am the only person left to remember my father's service, to recall what it meant to him and what it cost him, and to give thanks for the effect his service had on his life and the lives that he touched.
My father and his brothers were the "Sons" in the family small contractor firm "Wm. Brad and Sons", and each was a master in one trade and very good at the others. They enlisted in 1944, after finally either persuading their wives that they needed to do so or declaring that they were going to do so. This was after the famous "Private Ryan" incident, so they were split up into different services based on their individual talents and abilities. One ability that set them apart was speaking multiple languages. At home they spoke Hungarian (their dad) and German (their mom) as well as English. In addition, my father was a natural polyglot who spoke and wrote six languages when he enlisted (he was the extended-family scribe to all the relatives in The Old Country.) Uncle Joe, the eternal-optimist youngest, was a master plumber who could fix anything; he ended up in the Navy, serving in the Pacific. Uncle Bill, the middle brother, was a fabulous raconteur, a master electrician, and a small and wiry man; he was chosen to enter the Army Air Corps and to work in Intelligence, parachuting into Hungary to work with the Resistance there. (He joked that he looked emaciated enough to pass as a native.) My father, Frank, was a quiet, introspective man, a master carpenter who also had the gift of being able to study a building or carving or molding and be able to sketch it and know its dimensions, then to be able to carve it to absolute perfection. He could also imitate any singer (his Dame Joan Sutherland singing the Queen of the Night aria was incredibly realistic and would get me into hot water later in life....that's a story for another time.) But the ability the services were most interested in was his skill with a rifle. It turned out that, from hunting with his father and extended family, he was a marksman of great skill, and the 'look-measure' ability played into that. He was sent to Okinawa in the Army. (He picked up Japanese in a month or so and never lost it; another 'another time' story.)
Dad had two assignments. One was as quartermaster for his post deep in the jungle; the other was as a marksman. He only talked about his days as a quartermaster, and even then rarely.
You know how families have a family language and a family code, embodied in phrases that one's parents and grandparents use constantly? My Dad's phrases all revolved around God, honor, and family:
"Do your best to serve The Man Upstairs or get out of the way." (He always addressed Our Lord directly as 'Sir'.)
"Your word is your honor--always keep it, always." ("If you get tricked into giving your word to something rotten, get out of it right away and make it right.")
"I don't care if you're black, brown, pink with purple polka-dots: do an honest day's work for an honest day's pay, own up to your mistakes and fix them, always leave a place cleaner than you found it."
"Take care of your family and the people attached to you who have no one else to take care of them."
Dad hated the grinding poverty and starvation of the Okinawans left behind by the war--women and girls of every age, men over 70 and boys under 12--and he did whatever he could to alleviate their suffering when he could. He had a very deep compassion for the boys, who had no one to teach them how to be true (honorable) men and were having to act like men long before they should have to do so.
He was thrice 'busted back' in rank for allowing the villagers to scrounge in the post's dump after the soldiers had been issued new blankets or boots or jackets or whatever--he could not understand why perfectly good items should be burnt instead of being given to the needy, and so 'failed to secure' the dump's gate, even after being ordered to make sure that "the enemy" got not one scrap from the dump. Dad didn't see an "enemy"--he saw people trying to take care of themselves and their families with no means of support. The standoff between the CO and Dad ended only with Dad's enlistment ending.
The use of his marksmanship was never talked about, and only after his death in 1992 did my mother tell me what she knew. Dad was often sent to inter-service marksmanship competitions which he apparently won more often than not. He would come back to the jungle post with small items that he knew people needed; he would repair or build things for the villagers. But what hurt him the most was having to be a sniper. Toward the end of the war and during the occupation of Japan, there were Japanese soldiers who holed up in the jungle and would kill anyone--man, woman, child, Japaness or not--who walked/rode along the tortuous roads. My father would be sent out to 'deal with' these 'crazies'. Mum told me that when Dad found his 'target' he would pray, "Sir, just one shot, please." His book had 167 targets, all with the notation "one shot" and, in much tinier letters, "thank You." Mum said he knew that he had discharged his duty honorably, but that he grieved every day that his duty had involved taking life, even to protect others, both 'us' and 'them'. He had a Purple Heart and tons of medals for competitions and for his 'excellence' in his job; we never saw them until after his death. While my uncles would tell stories about their experiences, in which they always found cameraderie, friendship, and grace and heroism under pressure, Dad never talked about his.
After Dad returned from overseas, he suffered some family losses, not because of what he'd done but because of other people's actions. I believe that those losses, coupled with his experiences, are why he very quietly became a mentor and surrogate father/grandfather to two generations of boys. He took a break from this while raising the two children he and Mom adopted in the 60's (me and a younger boy), but after we left home, the pastor would point out to him boys in need, and he would bring them into his manly orbit: fishing, fixing up the church and elderly people's homes, building all sorts of things for the community, pruning trees and shrubs and digging and planting vegetable gardens, all the sort of men's work that was second nature to him but less and less commonly pursued as the neighboring community became less and less rural and increasingly white-collar. He was the one that the Vietnam vets (including some of my cousins) would come and sit with at the old dining room table, and go away comforted and strengthened. He was a member of his local VFW post, where he and Mum were a fixture at the Tuesday night live-music-and-dancing-after-dinner night, and never missed cleaning up veterans' graves and putting out flags on Memorial Day and Labor Day. A quiet, undemonstrative, faithful man, doing what he could in his sphere of influence.
At the wake following his funeral in 1992, I was approached by a stream of men between 15 and 55, a few in uniform, each of whom said, "Pat, I know you don't know me/maybe you don't remember me, but your dad saved my life/turned me around/saved my marriage/brought me back to God." The familiar faces were a surprise; I stopped counting the unfamiliar faces after I reached 30.
Thank you for reading this far, and helping me remember my father. May all our veterans and our servicemen and -women find their way to being the men and women they were created to be by our Heavenly Father. May we learn from them, and remember those who have gone before, give thanks for them, and pray for them.
