Sunday, November 15, 2009
Opinion

A belated Veterans Day salute

 It was all that we are, all we will ever be, members of the warrior class who still believe that there are some things worth dying for.

By Stephanie Ramage

My father, a U.S. Marine, was a World War II veteran. He served in the Pacific, and later he served in the reserves during the Korean War.

He was rough. Growing up in his house was hell. I am the youngest of eight children, six of whom survived. (The loss of two of my four brothers wasn’t Dad’s fault: Chris was a baby with something called Hyaline membrane syndrome, and 16-year-old Phillip died after a failed kidney transplant—it was Dad’s kidney that was transplanted.)

My other two brothers, Jim and Lyndon, served in the Marines and the Army, respectively. Jim served during the Vietnam era, and Lyndon was a lifer. He retired last May, after serving in every combat zone in which the U.S. Army has showed its helmeted head since 1979, with the exception of the invasion of Iraq in 2003. He just came home from Afghanistan a little over a year ago.

As I write this, I have a nephew named Alex serving in the Army in Afghanistan, who also served in Iraq.  [Editor's Note: The print version of this story erroneously omitted Alex's service in Iraq.] And just last week, my niece Samantha’s husband shipped out to Afghanistan. Samantha and her husband are both Marines, both U.S. Naval Academy graduates. They eloped about two months ago after a whirlwind courtship, which is, I must admit, in keeping with family tradition. Samantha expects that she will probably deploy to Afghanistan as well. 

[After the paper went to press, Samantha learned that she will be shipping out in January on a destroyer charged with patrolling the shipping lanes off the horn of Africa.]

This is all old, familiar ground to me. My family’s holidays have always included a game of passing the phone around as someone in the military calls home from a combat zone to say “Happy Birthday,” “Happy Thanksgiving,” or “Merry Christmas.”

When I look back on my childhood, it is littered with huge green duffle bags and small metal footlockers with “United States Marine Corps” or “U.S. Army” stamped on them.

Shortly after I graduated from the University of Georgia, while working at a tiny daily newspaper, I had to write a column about Guadalcanal, because the anniversary of that bloody battle had rolled around. My father was at Guadalcanal, but he never spoke of it. The deadline loomed large, and no other Guadalcanal veterans materialized, so I finally mustered the courage to ask him if I could interview him. He said no.

Eventually, I pointed out that I might lose my job and be unable to make my car payment. He then agreed.
 
We sat in his den and he told me all that happened there. How his buddies were wounded and killed. How he himself was too injured to go to their aid. Supplies were short and conditions deplorable. And yet, they won.

He was 18 years old on Guadalcanal, just five years older than my son is now.

When he spoke of the dead and his own helplessness, his eyes filled with tears he wouldn’t let spill. He cradled his head in his hands and I sat there, silent as a stone, afraid to move, unable to believe what I was seeing. The monster of my childhood had monsters of his own. I reached out and took his hand and we sat there like that for minute. Then he said gruffly, “Have you got what you need now?”

“Yes, sir,” I said quietly, and slipped away up the stairs to my old room, where I cried.

In February 2003, my father died of lung cancer that had spread to his brain. He’d started smoking on Guadalcanal, to calm his nerves. I was with him three days before his death, in his room at the Veterans Administration hospital in Dublin, Ga. 

I was sitting on the edge of his bed, chatting with him, though he couldn’t respond very well, because his tongue was so swollen, bloody and peeling. He started struggling for breath, and I went looking for a nurse. It was a long time before I found anyone who could help, because that huge, rambling hospital was so understaffed. I was frantic by the time I spotted a doctor and led him back to the room Dad shared with three other veterans.

The doctor and a couple of nurses worked on him for a minute. Then Dad lay back, exhausted, and reached up for my hand. I took it and remembered, looking at his gnarled, calloused fingers, all the stories he’d told me about the villages in Guam, the Marshall Islands, New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, the pretty nurse who took care of him in Australia when he had malaria. I remembered how proud he was of the American flag, how he despised people who used it as an ornament, how voting was something he never skipped—it was what his friends had died for.

His mind was on other things that day, I’m sure, because as he held my hand he managed to get out two words: “I’m sorry.”

I looked around that little room with four old dying veterans packed into it, I heard the silence of the hallway where a nurse or doctor were hard to find, I saw the ravaged mouth that those cigarettes on Guadalcanal had eventually given him, and I said, “Thank you, Dad, and I’m sorry.”

Days later, my nephew played “Taps” on his trumpet as an honor guard presented my mother with the flag that draped Dad’s coffin. The Marines had folded it into a neat triangle, and one of them dropped to his knee, bowed his head and offered it up to my mother like a sacrifice. I looked at it as I held my 7-year-old son on my lap and I realized that it was as if my whole family were wrapped in that flag. It was all that we are, all we will ever be, members of the warrior class who still believe that there are some things worth dying for. SP