Veterans Day

As part of CNN’s observance of Veterans Day, Michael is expected to be on AC360 Tuesday night. Not sure whether he may also make appearances earlier in the day, but just in case he’s up before I am, I thought I’d open a post for discussion.

I come from a Navy family, so November 11th was always a special day in our home. My maternal grandmother served in both World Wars; she was stationed in an underground bunker beneath the Brooklyn Navy Yard. You know how in those old movies they had those big map tables and little wooden ships were moved around them to indicate where the fleet was? She was one of the people who did that. Like a giant game of Risk, except she knew which of her neighbors’ sons were on which ships. She could never tell them whether their boys were safe or if their ship had been torpedoed. People kept secrets like that back then.

Both my parents served in the Navy in WWII, although they didn’t meet until later (attending Columbia on the GI Bill.) My father was on a carrier in the South Pacific, as I recall. My mother was in Naval Intelligence (please skip the old joke, thanks) based in San Francisco and on Bainbridge Island near Seattle. She intercepted and translated Japanese radio communications. (She was taught Japanese while having bagpipes played at high volume so she could hear “through” noise; for the rest of life, she loathed the sound of bagpipes despite our Scot blood.)

I remember once when I was a young teenager, Congress was holding hearings to investigate whether we had known about the attack on Pearl Harbor before it happened. I was indignant as only a naif can be; of course my country would not have allowed such a thing! And as I sputtered indignantly at the newscast, my mother said quietly, “It’s true. The president knew. I knew.” It was one of those moments when your world tips on its axis. I just stared at her in shock.

The listening post at Bainbridge had intercepted radio signals the night before and alerted Washington. The decision was made to allow it to happen, presumably because it was the only way the American people would get involved in the war. My mother’s team was threatened that they would be charged with treason if they ever spoke about it; decades later she still feared the possibility. And she still carried the guilt over all the men and women who died that morning.

(They were also given Presidential Citations, although they were not allowed to tell anyone about them. Under the circumstances, why would they have wanted to?)

Much later, the story was included in the movie Pearl Harbor, although my mother swore a blue streak when I told her that in the film it was all men on the radios. Men were sent to war, women were trained to speak Japanese and operate the radios.

My mother passed away two years ago. I was never able to convince her to speak publicly of what she knew. Despite all the guilt of that day, despite all the horrors of the Viet Nam war, she still believed in the need for a strong military. I think a lot of my fury at Don Rumsfeld stems from her patriotism and the knowledge that those who put on the uniform deserve better from the civilians who have sent them into battle. And the military we sent into Iraq was not given it; neither was the one sent into Afghanistan.

Today we honor the men and women who wore our country’s uniform, did what needed to be done, and came home. It is a day to celebrate the living; the battle-scarred and nightmare-haunted; those who left a piece of themselves in a foreign land, figuratively or literally, and those who never left US soil but worked tirelessly in support roles; those who re-up for the sake of their buddies, those who choose it as a career, and those who gut out their commitment and never look back.

We are a country because of all of them. We are a better country because of each of them.