My dad never got a purple heart, though he came close to death a few times and lived with death every day for a long time after the war. He served his country for 21 years in the army. He left half way though his senior year in high school, having earned enough credits already to graduate, so he graduated in absentia. From 1942 to 1945 he served in the Merchant Navy. He was part of a flotilla that was supplying Allied forces in North Africa while the U-boats were still very active around the Strait of Gibraltar. I think it was New Years Day, 1943 and half of the flotilla was sunk trying to get to Egypt. He then made trips when Italy was won back. They unloaded much needed cargo and then loaded up with some sort of ballast. I think I remember him saying it was some type of black sand. My dad had dozens of stories about seeing 21 countries by the time he was 21. After the war, my dad signed back up to serve with the Graves Registration Service. He travelled all over to help recover bodies of the fallen, often working side by shoulder, digging up the make-shift graves with Russian soldiers. He was in Berlin when it was being divided. He worked all over Europe, even along the Norwegian coastline looking for downed airmen’s bodies. He documented quite a bit of his work, but didn’t know what to do with it after the war. He knew what he was doing was historically significant and needed to be witnessed. When we lived on a farm in rural Wisconsin, some of my older siblings found his photographs and books in a shed. He was so devastated that his kids were exposed to such horrors of war, he burned almost all of it.
In WW1, my father lost all his uncles. My paternal grandfather had been injured in a logging accident and couldn’t serve because his knees had been crushed and he walked with a painful limp, so he, alone, lived to have a family and pass on the name. I have a Great Uncle Steven who is buried in Northern France.
The sacrifice people made and still make, every day, to fight oppression and injustice and corruption MEANS something in my family. It isn’t a medal. It isn’t a trophy or a certificate on the wall. It is remembering and passing down the history and the stories and getting our children to feel the sense of loss and the absence of those people whose lives were cut short and won’t get a chance to tell their own stories or tell their own children. It is remembering WHY they put their lives on the line and what, exactly, they were fighting for and what the causes meant. Not all causes are the same but the sacrifices still deserve our respect. My father didn’t support the Gulf Wars, but he supported the troops. The Bushes turned him from a Republican to a Democrat. I learned all this from my father, who proudly served his country of the United States of America for over 20 years. He lived a long, amazing life and I’m just glad he’s not alive today to see this cluster-fuck of an election and how many people are there and ignorant of history and keep repeating the same damn mistakes and perpetuate lie upon lie because they are happy little puppets. Sorry, but now, I’m crying. I sit here watching from the sidelines in a privileged country in Western Europe. Thanks to the events in WW2, the Nazis don’t have the oil in the North Sea, Norway and Scotland do and I sit here like a pretty pretty princess with my social welfare and free University education for my son. I know who to thank. They didn’t all get medals. My father dug up their remains, wrote out a toe tag, put them in a bag and sent what he could find back to their families.