I was 5 years old when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and the men and women left to go off to war, and the women that stayed behind had to take up the slack and do the work at home. GI Joe, Rosie The Riveter and Nurse Nancy were born of extreme need. Lots of men from my family fought in this war to end all wars, some of them came home, some didn’t, and the ones that did come home were changed forever. From the steamy Jungle of the Pacific, to the bitter cold of Europe, our brave men and women fought and won on both fronts.
War, at home, meant rationing, and saving things like tin cans and paper to recycle back to the war effort. You had little coupons, that you used to get the small amount of gas that was allowed. Certain foods were scarce in the Markets. The factories all went to building War materials. Tires were very carefully protected because they were scarce as hen’s teeth. We heard of top secret things going on in Oak Ridge,Tennessee and out in Arizona and Utah, but it wasn’t until the Big Bomb was dropped on Hiroshima that we understood that the world we had known was gone and something new, that we didn’t quite have a handle on yet, had just taken its place.
This World War II was the last war where we achieved total victory, and we achieved that victory because we were united together in our just cause. The soldiers, sailors and aviators came home and were welcomed and honored.
For a brief period of time War seemed an awful long way from the Ozark mountain farm where I was growing up. But, my heroes were those brave soldiers, flyers and sailors that came home with the stories of the Great War. I played War in the woods and creek that flowed through our farm with the boys from the neighboring farms, building forts, floating crude little boats in the creek and climbing the mast of a great sailing ship in my mind as I sat in the fork of the old sycamore down by the spring.
I was in High School when Korea started. It was a different type of war and there was even those Politicians who refused to call it a war….those Politicians called it a “Police Action”, but of course, the Pols were not laying in the muddy fox holes, or freezing their tails off on some frozen, snow packed hillside as hordes of Chinese and North Koreans were trying their best to kill our sons of liberty.
The perspective of War is different, depending on whether you are being shot at on a front line, or sitting in your warm office in Washington making the War decisions. Truman and MacArthur are perfect examples ot that difference. And, if you young folks don’t know that story, look it up and educate yourself.
I graduated from Pleasant Hope High in June of 1954, packed up my youthful Ozark self, and in August of ’54, along with my best friend Paul Covey, joined the U.S. Navy. The Korean War, or Police Action, depending on your politics, had wound down by the time I got to boot camp, in Great Lakes Naval Training Center, but I got in some good practice in guarding the Dempster Dumpster trash containers, on cold winter nights, with ice cold wind coming off of Lake Michigan. Yessir, I’ll tell you, there never was a threat to try to take them trash containers as long as I was on guard.
I went on board my new home, the USS Bryce Canyon (AD-36), in January ’55 at Mare Island, just outside San Francisco, California. A few weeks later we were underway on my first tour of the Far East.
First stop, Hawaii, then Subic Bay, Phillipines and then on to the Naval Station at Yokosuka, Japan. Yokosuka was our home port overseas, with side trips to Sasebo, Kobe, Japan, Okinawa and my favorite….Hong Kong, China. For a kid who had never been outside of the Ozarks mountains, this was exactly how I wanted to grow up. Seeing the world through a port hole was what I had always dreamed about on those cold winter nights when I was laying in my bed, upstairs in the attic of our farm house, and heard that lonesome whistle blow through the night as a steam locomotive pulled passenger cars across the land to parts unkown. I knew the world was waiting for me to discover it, and I was, with my bell bottoms and sailor hat pulled down low on my forehead, going from boy to manhood courtesy of the U.S. Navy.
I played music with a bunch of my shipmates with our country band that we called “The Bryce Canyon Troubadours”. Pee Wee Garrison, from Georgia, on fiddle, Smoky, on the big dog house bass, from Kentucky, Roger from Minneapolis playing a great big Gretsch Electric guitar, and me playing rhythm guitar and singing all the Webb Pierce, Roy Acuff, Ernest Tubb, Carl Smith and all the other popular recording artists and Grand Ole Opry Stars of the 40’s and 50’s. We played all the NCO Clubs, Enlisted Men’s Clubs, Army Hospitals and a few old knock down and drag out bars, on the beaches when we got liberty. Our favorite regular gig though was playing before the movie on the main deck of the ship when we were underway. Nothing has ever been quite as beautiful as singing a good ole country song with the full moon rising over the Pacific Ocean as we sailed from japan to California and back again. Singing to a ship full of homesick sailors, them sad songs really went a long way, and so, I became a “sad song singer”, and never really found a reason to change.
I can still, in my mind, smell the oil refineries of Long Beach, California, when we were at least a hundred miles out at sea, coming back from a years deployment in Japan. It was the smell of home, even though it sure was different from the smell of the Ozark mountains on a warm summer day.
I treasure the 4 years I spent as a member of the US Navy, and the friendships and memories that I will always cherish. Some of the memories, like the Typhoons of the Far East which brought seasickness that I thought was gonna be terminal, to the joy of running the big 50 foot motor launches and LCM’s as the boat coxswain, hauling crew and supplies from the ship to shore, and learning to plot a course with them in the fog of California when you couldn’t see 6 inches in front of your face.
It was a time of transition, 18 to 22 years of age, when I changed from a green kid to a well traveled man, at home anywhere in the world.
My sons have never witnessed a war ended in victory, for since World War II, our skirmishes, police actions and other political references, of good versus evil, have gradually turned from black and white to shades of gray. However, whatever the pundits call our efforts to protect our freedom, the commitment and heroism of the men and women who are on the front lines has remained steadfast. They are simply, “the best of the best”.
Yes, I am a veteran. True, my service was in peacetime, and I never had to be in some muddy foxhole like the real warriors, but my time served was for all the right reasons. I was there to serve and protect, and do whatever was asked with a true belief in the goodness of my country. With the dangers of the new terrorist enemies we must stay strong, wherever we might serve, and we must hold on to the feeling of goodness of country.
As General Douglas McArthur said, when hs stepped down from his leadership role, leading our Armed Forces. “Old Soldiers Never Die, They Just Fade Away.”
To all the Veterans of all the wars or peace time, we honor you and thank you for your service. You and the families that also serve, are the true heroes and patriots of the great land of America, You will never “fade away” in our minds.
God bless us all.
Stan
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