Across America, we see groups and organizations, most of them small and local, that do what they can to demonstrate the respect we owe veterans. For example, here in Massachusetts, in Braintree, the home of John Adams, the Atlantic Symphony Orchestra is dedicating the final performance of its season this coming Saturday night to the 15.8 million veterans still with us. Although their numbers have been declining in recent years, falling 25% since 2010, the devotion to country of these men and women has never wavered.
I intend to be in that audience. Here’s why.
Very shortly after 1967 had become 1968, and after I had done everything I could to avoid anything to do with Vietnam, two friends arrived back in America. They had been killed in action. Now, like more than 50,000 others, they would forever be remembered as shrouded in military olive green.
I felt a sense of shame and, with the impetuosity of youth, visited an Army recruitment office in Haverhill, Massachusetts, and enlisted in the Army’s Officer Candidate School.
When I told my father what I had done that evening at dinner, he was horrified. The first thing he said was, “Tom, have you lost your mind?”
Maybe.
But I understood why he asked that question with such disgust. In mid-1943, he had been drafted for World War II. In January 1944, as a member of the 3rd Division, he had been in the first wave of the Battle of Anzio, the Allies’ Operation Shingle, launched amphibiously on the western edge of central Italy.
As my father and about thirty other soldiers dropped into the LST that would carry them to shore for the invasion, his Lieutenant handed him a box and told him to carry it — carefully — to shore. Asked what was in it that was so valuable, the Lieutenant replied, “Nitroglycerin bombs.”
When they exited the LST and hit the water, the first thing my father got rid of, pushing it as far as he could back out to sea, but ever so gently, were those bombs. Sometimes, war has its humorous, surreal moments.
He was among those who scaled the cliffs of Anzio. Then, after being held down by fierce German resistance for three months, the Americans broke through and, in May, captured and liberated Rome.
Anzio cost the lives of 5,538 Americans, with another 18,000 wounded. The dead are buried in the Sicily-Rome American Cemetery, just east of the town of Anzio. Like Normandy and Arlington National Cemetery, it consists of neatly lined-up white crosses with the names of the dead.
The 3rd Division then headed up and into France on their way to Germany.
My father never made it to Germany. After every one of his squadmates had been killed or seriously wounded, he had his own meeting with a German bullet. He was shot through the shoulder by a round that ended up an eighth of an inch from his spine. He was left to die in a corridor of an Army MASH hospital in France.
He fooled everyone. He did not die, but he did spend eight months rehabbing in an Army hospital back in the U.S. The bullet that got him remained next to his spine the rest of his life. He never would raise his right arm above his shoulder again. However, this high school All-American football player did learn to throw a football, sidearm, to his sons with real snap to it.
He, like so many others, had become a living veteran.
I spent nearly two years in Vietnam, but I do not think a single moment of that experience could rival the horror of what my father and all the other members of the Greatest Generation went through on their way to saving humanity from the depravity and outright evil of the Third Reich.
To give “the last full measure” so that others may live in peace is often not appreciated by those who have never experienced the horror of war. I suppose that’s understandable. However, as that is the highest gift one person can give another, we need frequent reminding. We need to realize that warfare is to be avoided at all costs and never venerated, let alone glorified.
My father and the other 16.4 million Americans who fought to send Hitler to the fifth circle of Hell, as well as those who followed them through peace and battle, deserve the utmost respect from every American, regardless of ideology or political views.
Saturday night’s concert in Braintree will have the utmost meaning for me.
