My Dad on Memorial Day

I'm not exactly sure how my dad got into the Coast Guard. He may have been hoping to avoid anything overseas, given the fact that he'd just become a father; but there had to be more to it because he knew dozens of other fathers who went off to Europe or the South Pacific. His being "Coast Guard"meant very little anyway, because the Navy simply strong-armed the whole corps once the going got rough.

He ended up spending most of his three years in the South Pacific. He never talked much about it, not because his war-time experience was so horrifying, but because it wasn't--at least that's what I came to believe. Once he was trained, he was deployed aboard the LT-59, a tugboat, a vehicle whose very name suggests a cartoon figure. Aboard that little tug he and crew of just a few jockeyed destroyers and aircraft carriers around South Seas ports. 

The LT-59

I think he might say "pushing battleships around" sounds more glamorous than it was. He never once came anywhere close to "action," as we say, although he was always somewhere near. If he ever witnessed things he wished he hadn't, they had nothing to do with bloody death. 

His brother and his sister were both in medical units that picked up after battles. He used to tell me that Uncle Jay and Aunt Agnes saw things human beings shouldn't have. When he'd say that, he meant it. In a certain, odd way, in his own mind, his war-time service, I think, didn't measure up to what others had given, and therefore wasn't worth talking much about. 

He used to joke about being on the high seas, about dining tables that slid back and forth across the floor in fierce storms, carrying their grub them. Every time it would slide back in place, they'd hammer down the food because the next wave would slide the whole business back across the room. He did the scene himself in pantomime. We laughed because he did.

He was there at Diamond Back in Hawaii, but he got there two years and more after the attack at Pearl Harbor, even sent back a picture to his loving wife, drew in airplanes through the gap where Hirohito sent his killers.

Throughout the war, he tried to let Mom know where he was, even though that kind of info was heavily censored. One attempt at camouflage involved a church organist. "How's Anna Wieskamp lately?" he wrote my mom. "I thought of her a couple days ago already." 

Anna Wieskamp was a church organist. Mom knew very well her hubby wasn't thinking one bit about Anna Wieskamp, so she searched the South Pacific closely and found a series of islands named Eniwetok. It was a game they played, but I'm sure, for both of them, it was also a comfort. 

On board the LT-59, he was not the boss but the bursar, the one appointed to keep the books. Mostly, I suppose, he pushed paper. It was neither glamorous nor frightful. He was, I suppose, just a small cog in a huge and mighty war machine. 

Once the the fighting was over, I don't know that he ever pulled on his uniform again. He never walked in step with the American Legion come Memorial Day--what my grandmother used to call "Decoration Day"--never marched in an honor guard. I'm not sure anyone ever taught him how to shoot a rifle. I doubt he ever did. 

But both he and my father-in-law, who spent his war years in the European theater, were poised and ready for what both of them--and everyone--considered to be the bloodiest battle of them all: the battle that would be waged on the island of Japan. Both of them had orders that both of them understood.

Then came the bomb. Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There would be no Battle of Japan. World War II ended.

My dad's little brother Ward worked on the Manhattan Project, as did Roger Voskuil, his brother-in-law. Both of them were research chemists. In my mind, any discussion of the legitimacy of the dropping "Little Boy" on Hiroshima will be forever colored by all of those very personal service records. 

War is hell. Sometimes I wonder if he might simply say it that way, that war simply isn't something to remember, even though sacrifice is, as is selflessness, giving one's life for a friend. My dad never paid much attention to Memorial Day--loved it as a holiday, but had to be goaded to attend "the doings," the ritual in the town cemetery. He could chuckle at memories on board the LT-59, but once his train pulled up at the station in Milwaukee, where my mom met him, alone, just the two of them, for him the war was over.

He'd given his country three years, done it willingly, had no choice about where or how he'd served. He saw the world, lugged around instruments of battle that made football fields look like backyards. He was never far from horror. But when it was all over, he didn't pass that way again.

It's Memorial Day today, and outside my window, rain is falling. Anywhere in the region, right now American Legions are letting people know that "the doings" will be in the school gym or some church or town hall. They'll get done, even though nobody, today, will stand out in the cemetery among the myriad flags. 

In the spirit of the holiday, I'm remembering my dad and his service during the war because I've always been proud of it and him, even if he didn't think much about it when he returned. 

My dad was very much among those, back then, who served their country.