Our Heroes are Fading Away

I waited seventy years, but I finally got the story.

My father is 95. I was born on his birthday, seventy-one years ago. He was a Gunnery Officer in the Pacific. I couldn’t understand what kind of ship he was on, except it was a type of troop transport and landing ship.

He brought home a bunch of souvenirs from the war, mostly Japanese weapons and uniforms. The uniforms fit me when I was a boy and I wore them out. I destroyed the weapons and everything else of value. I was a wild kid. I remember my father watching me as I destroyed his war mementos and shaking his head in disgust and disbelief. The only time he got mad was when I broke the blade of a K-Bar (Marine Knife). I never asked why it meant so much to him and I am not going to ask him now.

He stood straight the summer before, and complained about losing all his basketball teammates to the undertaker. He had no one to play basketball with.

He flew to California to work with me for a couple of weeks. He wasn’t standing straight, and he was using a cane. The airport insists on putting old people in wheelchairs and I was afraid  of an altercation, and waited at the gate, to avoid problems. He is proud and refuses to believe he is getting older. I managed to talk him out of going postal. It was going to be a long walk to the car and he was tired after two flights.

I cooked for us and he was skeptical when I told him I’d be cooking Mexican Cuisine. I told him, I had learned a lot about my vague Spanish heritage, and I had been studying with some old-time Mexican cooks.

He told me, without mincing words, he never minced words, “I don’t eat spicy foods, with onions and peppers. Spicy foods don’t agree with me.”

I encouraged him to give the first meal an honest test; if he didn’t like it, I’d cook him something else.

I served the meal and after the first bite his eyes lit up. “This is damn good.” He ate a few more bites and said, “This is like the food I had onboard ship.”

“That’s a hell of a compliment to a man who just cooked you a nice meal.”

“No, you don’t understand. The cook for the officers was a black from Georgia, named Postel.”

“Was that his first name or last name?”

“It was his only name. He was right out of the slave culture.”

“That’s bizarre.”

“That’s the way it was. He was lucky. They taught him how to cook for the officers. It’s not an equality thing; the officers ate much better food than the enlisted men. Our cooks went through special training, but Postel was the best.

I made him the Captain of a gun crew and after the war, he said that was the nicest thing that happened to him in the Navy. Some of the guys were mean to him, but I liked him. When we secured one of the islands, I invited him up to the bridge to get a good look. He was proud to be on the bridge and the view was magnificent, but some floaters drifted by and he got sick.”

I innocently asked, “What are floaters?”

My dad looked at me as if I was a little boy, “Dead Japanese.”

He finished his plate and wandered into the kitchen and emptied the skillet, of my second serving.

When he sat down to eat my second serving, he said, “Who’d have ever thought you would be a good cook.”

He went with me on various jobs and couldn’t believe the traffic and the speeds we hit on the open highway and in the mountains. He said, “If I was with anyone else, this would scare the crap out of me.”

He has watched me with horses, since I was a boy; so, there were no surprises. He just said, “I still don’t know how you do it. Horses and dogs like you, and they have since you were a boy.”

He said he had a wonderful time and promised to fly out again next summer, but that’s not going to happen; he is deteriorating too fast. I have promised to fly to his place and take him fishing next summer, if he is physically able, but he is in a nursing home, now.

A few nights ago, he called to talk about the Navy, the war, and the various island campaigns. He was at Tarawa, Saipan, Okinawa, Iwo Jima, and a few other minor skirmishes.

He had never really talked about the war, except to say, “The Marines didn’t hit the beach at Tarawa, until the Japs were running low on machine gun ammunition.” He said this, when I told him I had enlisted in the Marines, but the other night he wanted to talk about the war and his sailors.

He used to fly to reunions to drink and talk with the sailors from his ship, but now, he is the only one left. He said, “As the gunnery officer on the bridge, I was the most exposed man on the ship, but they are all dead and I am the only one still alive.”

“I was a freshman in college during the fall of ’41. When the war started, the military told us college boys to stay in school. Soon they had a program for us. We could sign up for the Navy, Army, or Marine Corps. I chose the Navy because I liked the uniform. They shipped us from college to college to learn navigation and many other useful things; until we started learning to drive boats in the Atlantic. I was an eighteen-year-old Naval Officer. We drove a boat through the Panama Canal and were given a new ship south of Los Angeles, (He thought it might have been San Pedro), and headed off to war.”

He was breaking up at this time and I was wishing I had something to say that would make him feel better, but I was at a loss for something intelligent to say.

If you can get any of these snippets of history from these old warriors, make your move. An era is disappearing.