As a kid growing up, I remember that each year, just about this time, my dad would grow a little somber. For a normally fun-loving guy, his quiet moods stood out.
Until a certain age, I chalked it up to a change of the seasons -- a weariness brought on by the disappearance of the beautiful fall foliage and the long, looming upstate New York winter.
But as I grew older and my dad and I talked more about real world events, I realized the quiet came from a very dark place within that he kept bottled up most of the year. It was the place that stole pieces of my father's flesh and helped shape his heart and soul.
The place had a name: Tarawa. It was a spit of sand in the Pacific that the Japanese had heavily defended and that the U.S. deemed important enough to take.
On Nov. 20, 1943, those two sides, those two fighting forces collided in a torrent of bombs, bullets and flames. Waves of young Marines washed ashore in blood-filled waters strafed by machine gun fire.
The Marines were told the battle would last hours at most. Three days later, the island was finally captured, after American heroics overcame poor planning and bad luck. In the end, the numbers told the awful story of war. Roughly 3,300 Marines were killed or wounded. Of the more than 4,800 Japanese defenders on the island, all but 146 were killed.
My father was in that first brave wave to hit the shore. He was shot several times by the time he set foot on the beach. In holding his position that first night, a hand grenade tore out his right eye. He packed his wounds with sand, hoped for the best and prepared to die in the hot equatorial sun.
Somehow he survived -- the battle, the operations, the rehabilitation. He learned a lot lying there in the sand, floating in and out of consciousness. I was lucky enough to have him pass it on to me years later.
Wars are evil. Lives are torn apart, good people turn bad or are lost forever. Still, as bad as wars are, they sometimes needed to be fought. He was proud to have fought in WW2 and believed until his dying days that we fought on the side of good and vanquished unspeakably horrible evil. He would have done it again, would have suffered through it all, because in the end, he was convinced it was the right and only thing to do.
If he were alive today, I'm sure my father would line up in support of our troops in Iraq. I am equally sure he would line up against the war. He was a patriot, my father. He was proud to have served his country as a Marine and would argue with anyone who said a disparaging word against the service. But he would grow just as angry against politicians who threw precious American servicemen behind their words to fight a war that he felt served no national purpose.
He grew to become a vocal opponent to the Vietnam War -- against the war, but in support of our troops there and those who came home from it. And yet, he was a patriot. It may have looked odd in the '60s for a middle-aged, bald man with an eye patch to be in support of longhaired hippies, but my dad said it made all the sense in the world. Who better to understand the folly of war than someone who had experienced it?
These are some of the heady things I think about these days, nearly 51 years after my father fought in the sands of Tarawa. As other American troops fight in a place called Fallujah, I hope and pray the planning and luck is with them this time. I am proud of my father for his part in WW2 and am equally proud of all the soldiers and sailors engaged in this modern day battle in the sand.
But support of our troops shouldn’t be confused with support for war. Many people, like my father, consider themselves patriots, but are against the war. Support the troops, not the war. Some who cannot separate those two emotions likely haven’t seen or felt war’s terrible wounds.
One of these days, hopefully soon, the fighting will end. Regardless of whether we were for it or against it, we should all rejoice in unison that it is over, that evil has been vanquished. And we should stand together and demand that our politicians who waged the war wage an equally ferocious peace, so that the blood spilled in the sand, like that spilled in the waters around Tarawa, will not have been spilled in vain.
Previous Columns: Station Information: Copyright 2004 by ThePittsburghChannel. All rights reserved. This material may not be
published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
