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Moms and Memorial Day
(A few years ago, my local American Legion Post asked me to give a speech from a civilian’s point of view regarding Memorial Day. This post is adapted from that talk.)
It was 3 am. I awoke to the screams from the bedroom below. I crept down, fearful that if I woke my grandmother she might have a heart attack. She was thrashing in agony. I had to wake her from the nightmare. She was disoriented. There was a wild look in her eyes. Then she started to cry.
She gasped for air as she told me this was the same date that the lady down her street in Sacramento had received the news that her boy had been killed in action. “That poor, poor woman,” Beeb sobbed.
“She screamed every night and kept the whole neighborhood awake. I know the date. September 13th. It was the same day my Bobby died.” Beeb had lost her own son, Bobby, to leukemia on the eve of his 12th Birthday back in 1930. Beeb’s other son, Albert, was in the Army in Europe during the Second World War when her neighbor’s boy was killed.
What had those war years been like for that Swiss-Italian grandmother who’d defied her father and run off and married a Scot? Her only remaining son was in harm’s way—daily.
My other grandmother, Nina Palmquist Warren, had lost her brother Jim to tuberculosis; then her first baby (also named Jim) had died in child birth.Then her first husband, Cleve, died of TB, and now her eldest boy, Jim Pop—my dad—was with the 3rd Marine Division somewhere in the Pacific. Having experienced so much death, how did Mama Warren sleep while her boy was off fighting on islands no one could pronounce?
In the ’50s, my friend Johnny and I used to play soldier in his grandmother’s house. She had a room decorated like an officer’s cabin on ship. It had bunks, even a metal door with a porthole. Her boy, Gene Witter (who’d famously blocked a punt to beat Stanford in the Big Game), had been on the USS San Francisco during the battle of Guadalcanal when a Kamikaze pilot flew his plane into the bridge, killing Gene instantly. We were kids. We never knew how much pain was in that room.
Neither Gene, nor Uncle Al, nor Jim Pop had to go. They could have been exempted. Albert was Beeb’s sole support. He didn’t have to go. Jim Pop was crippled by a high school football injury. His right arm wouldn’t straighten out. He had to lie to get in. Finally, the paratroopers took him. But they wouldn’t let him jump, so he ended up in the Marines, where they determined that he was fit enough to wade through water onto sandy beaches into Japanese machine gun fire.
Gene Witter volunteered, like Uncle Al and Jim Pop. Just like young men and women volunteer today. I am in awe of these children who put on a uniform and carry a gun so that we here at home might breath free—and so that men and women abroad might be freed from the iron boot of vicious dictators and religious fanatics.
Now that I’m a parent of service-age children, my perspective is a little different. Do I want to hear my wife screaming in the night, fearing for the safety of our only son or our two daughters?
People like me can’t say, “I know what you’re going through.” We don’t. But we can be grateful. We can be respectful. We can offer our prayers. We can be cognizant every day that we have what we have—that we live the lives we live—only because other parents are enduring the unendurable.
Still, why do these kids do it? Why did Al, and Gene, and Jim Pop? Perhaps it it inappropriate for someone who has never seen combat to talk about Duty, Honor and Country. So I appeal to the words of a famed old soldier (who never died, but only faded away), as he addressed a West Point Class:
Duty, Honor, Country. The code which those words perpetuate embraces the highest moral law and will stand the test of any ethics or philosophies ever promulgated for the things that are right. The soldier, above all other men, is required to practice the greatest act of religious training—sacrifice. In battle, and in the face of danger and death, he discloses those divine attributes which his Maker gave when He created man in His own image. No physical courage and no greater strength can take the place of the divine help which alone can sustain him. However hard the incidents of war may be, the soldier who is called upon to offer and to give his life for his country is the noblest development of mankind.
We honor those men and women today.
But let us not forget the mothers and grandmothers—many the daughters of immigrants—who were no strangers to death from disease or poverty, yet somehow found the strength to give their country their sons—some of whom never came back.
If we sleep well tonight, it is because, for generations, mothers and grandmothers like Beeb and Mama Warren did not sleep well.
Those women raised the finest children the entire world has ever known.
We honor them. We honor all parents of soldiers. We are in their debt. And we shall never forget.
Published in General
Amen…..
Amen.
Amen.
Wow… and amen.
My father and his identical twin brother enlisted in the Navy at seventeen years old in 1943. Their dad had to sign their enlistment papers. I suspect that it was difficult for him to sign the paperwork because the family lost their daughter in a car accident. The two boys were the only children they had. I still have my dad’s enlistment papers. They both served in the Pacific and my dad saw combat as a submariner in the Pacific and my uncle served in Naval Aviation in the Pacific. They both survived the war.
My family has visited the USS Arizona Memorial and the Balao Class Submarine at Pearl Harbor. My daughter was amazed at how tight the living conditions were on that sub. When we took the boat out to the Arizona we saw families laying wreaths into the water over the Arizona. We also visited the National Military Cemetery at Punchbowl. I wonder how many parents never had the chance to visit the last resting place of a child due to the expense and distance of a trip to Hawaii.
Dear Jeffery, thank you so much for these meaningful words. Words that will never flow from the mouth of the man in OUR White House. Your Grandmother Warren I met personally after WWII, and she was such a caring person, even for those rag-tag children who dared to come onto her lawns.
AUMom. Thank you for the kind sentiments
Yes, we have been to the Arizona Memorial many, many times. It never fails to me one. I hope families have not missed out on visiting there due to the cost of a trip to Hawaii. That is a sad thought. I once (chaparoning a group of scouts) spent the night on the SS Pompanito (Submarine) when it was docked at Fisherman’s Warf in SF. I share your daughter’s thoughts. I was astounded at how cramped it was. How those submariners did it is way beyond me.
Thanks Jeffrey. My grandmother and grandfather endured three years of hell as my dad fought his way through the Pacific. He came out of it physically unscathed, but, I think, with deep emotional wounds. His mother and father had wounds too. They ought also be remembered as casualties of war. Particularly those who lost sons, daughters, husbands, wives, and parents. Survivors are veterans too.