New Orleans For many years, “war” holidays were unpaid by our organizations, except for July 4th. More recently, as Vietnam receded and wars became forever, we added it to the list. Technically, the day is meant to honor those who gave their lives for the country, but practically, it’s worth honoring those who also put themselves in service and harm’s way.
In our family, both mi companera and I lost uncles in WWII whom we never met. My father’s old brother, George, died in a training accident at Fort Orr in California when his jeep rolled over. Mi companera lost her uncle Murray in a training accident as well, when his plane developed engine problems and he had to crash to avoid a densely populated New York City neighborhood, losing his life and his crew. Efforts continue to have his sacrifice recognized by the military.
My father left an aircraft plant in Venice, California, and volunteered for the Navy in WWII. Taking the V-2 test given to all soldiers and sailors on his base, he did well enough that he was sent to NROTC, first at Milsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi, where he met my mother, the eventual valedictorian there, and then to Tulane University in New Orleans. He shipped out from there to Japan and other theaters in the Pacific as an ensign, but the war was functionally over by then. Mi companera’s father was in the Army and stayed until leaving around the Korean War, ending up as a major, long enough that she was born in Fort Chaffee, outside of Fort Smith, Arkansas. Her mother ran a munitions plant in Jacksonville, Arkansas during the war. Her aunt was a WAVE.
Military service didn’t end there. Her brother was in the National Guard during Vietnam. Another brother’s wife was born in England, where her father was a pilot and made the service his career, until he retired from the base in Shreveport, Louisiana, years later. Her sister was in the Army in Kentucky and Germany. Her husband made a career out of the Army in logistics serving in the US, Germany, Korea, Honduras, and other assignments both as a soldier and as a contractor. Her nephew followed the family tradition, though in the Navy, but also in logistics, where his training developed into a career after he mustered out to the private sector.
These are stories that are common in the South and West where our roots lie, and where military service is part of family traditions. Vietnam broke the mold. Some were able to get 2-S exemptions as students. Others went to Asia, and some left the country. Once the lottery replaced the full-on draft, some, like my brother, taught school for a year after their exemption ended, waiting to see if their number was called.
The lottery was too late for me. My father couldn’t understand me dropping out of college, initially to organize draft counseling and resistance, because “the military had saved him” by sending him to school. Leaving school made me 1-A. I did three draft physicals that I can remember, first in New Orleans, then Springfield, Massachusetts, and finally Little Rock, Arkansas, until I aged out at 26 and became 4-F, by refusing to do deep knee bends and producing a tattered letter from Ochsner Hospital saying I needed knee surgery from a football injury, which I still have refused to have. When asked about my military service for a long time I would answer that I was “part of the vast army” referring to the old political reference to the “vast army of the unemployed.” In more recent decades, I would simply say, I was part of “the peoples’ army” and let that speak for itself.
Ending mandatory conscription in the US was a great thing, but Memorial Day should remind contemporary generations that the volunteer army should not be something simply ignored. Being forced to make a decision about war, as all of the WWII, Korean, and Vietnam generation had to do, was a momentous part of life choices, making war more intimate for all Americans. Now US wars are more a financial problem, than a life changing personal dilemma. It is too easy to forget that sitting peacefully at home is a choice and privilege, while politicians mindlessly send others to fight and die, or pretend that missiles and drones can do the job now and in the future.