MOS 658

The reason I titled this MOS 658: After my late father-in-law’s death, we received an envelope from the VA hospital in Florida. He’d meticulously saved his WWII military documents, but to my knowledge never showed them to the family. A quiet man, he rarely talked about the war. Most men seldom did. Years after he died, we started calling it The Greatest Generation. But we didn’t always know it when we were closest to it.

In June 1971 I was at a popular NYU bar and got to hang out with Roscoe C. Browne, one of the big-shot professors of the (then brand new) Black Studies department. He was one of the earliest US pilots to achieve a kill on a jet. Wow, a black guy who shot down a Nazi. Sounds like hot stuff—and it was. I told the story because he wouldn’t. He didn’t mind, though—it clearly impressed the hell out of the girls at the table. As it should have.

To a nineteen-year-old, in hippie-era, Vietnam War-era Greenwich Village, WWII seemed like a million years ago. At the time, though, it was only 26 years back. Dr. Browne smiled, accepted a round of drinks, and gently said a few words that didn’t mean anything to me at the time. He made a crooked grin, lifted the glass, and said: “To final approach.”

For decades I didn’t think about it. Then I read a tweet from Chuck Yeager about his own WWII experiences. When all we had were propellers, those German jets could, sadly, wipe the floor with our planes in many situations. Our own first jet fighter, Shooting Star, was late to the game. But it was also too late in the war for the Nazis.

How’d Yeager and Browne do it? “Final approach.” Even the swiftest, most maneuverable planes had to fly straight, level, and predictably into a landing to refuel, and those pioneering Nazi jets ran out of fuel quickly. That’s when you got them. Dr. Browne’s cryptic toast tacitly acknowledged that it was a brutal trick of war, grimly played on a murderous enemy. Yeager’s tweet shrugged, “Not very sporting, but what the hell.”

Two years ago, we found the manila envelope from the Veterans Administration with my father-in-law’s papers. I’d known vaguely that he had something to do with navigation in the Army Air Corps. The “658” scrawled in the corner of a page referred to Military Occupational Specialty 658. He was not only an instructor in the then-secret Link Trainer, an early simulator used to teach instrument navigation, but he taught the other instructors. He was, apparently, one of the best. The 1946 movie The Best Years of Our Lives gives an impression of what a whole generation lived through.

He died a month before his first grandchild was born. We saw a 1989 letter from the family insurance agent, a man who’d known him for many years, wrapping up remaining business. The letter was made on a dot matrix printer—a sign of its time—and there’s a handwritten postscript.

When your son grows up and has understanding—Convey this message to him.

His grandfather at all times was a proper person—both in his speech, his dress, and consideration of other people’s feelings.

Certainly, that’s all true. It’s almost poignant that he felt that being proper would be regarded as an enduring virtue even a generation into the future. It was rather thoughtful to realize that a baby who was then not quite a month old would be a real person someday and need to know about the strengths of his grandfather.

My father-in-law lived from 1917 to 1989, an interval that many historians call “the short twentieth century”—from WWI to the end of the Cold War.

Not many years later, I went to a meeting held at the Beverly Hills VFW Hall, a tiny island of old-fashioned civic architecture on a street that would become vastly busier and richer in the Fifties and Sixties. There was a wall-sized mural depicting doughboys in flat metal helmets charging a ridge at the side of those strange, ancient trapezoidal battle tanks. The legend at the bottom was dedicated “to the veterans of the World Wars” with the “s” clearly painted in later. Twenty-five years later.

“Never forget.” Eventually we do. But not all of us, not all the time.