Also gone but not forgotten

Cassi Creek 7 December 2009 – overcast, 28°F



I no longer know any Pearl Harbor survivors. I can’t say with certainty how many I ever knew but I think I knew about ten over the course of years. Like all our WWII veterans they are vanishing from our lives as theirs run rapidly out.

When I did part of my clinical training at Harry Truman VA Hospital in Columbia, MO, there were a few WWI vets around but the majority of the older guys were WWII veterans with a smaller percentage of Korean War vets in the population. We VietNam vets were the young guys, not really appreciated all that much by the vets from the real and righteous wars.

In fact, after too many drinks in a local bar several of us VietNam vets who had returned to or migrated to U of Mo decided that we should join the local VFW. We were, indeed, veterans of a foreign war, and therefore qualified for membership. We were rebuffed at the door and told that our kind was not welcome. We had the bad luck to have been awarded the 2nd place medal in the Southeast Asian War games running 1964-1975. We were the first U.S. troops to have been on the losing side of a war. As such, we were deemed unfit to drink ourselves into a steady state of inebriation and tell war stories with the guys who’d played on a winning side.

About 1980 it began to dawn on the VFW that they were going to run out of members and money if they didn’t find a new source of members. There was a lack of cohesiveness in the VietNam veteran populace. Some of us supported the war when it was ongoing; others of us were opposed to it. The enlistees, “RA’s” for their service number prefix, tended to be southern, more rural, and to have supported the war. The conscripts tended to be urban and northern in origin, and if not opposed to the war, at least not highly supportive. Then there were the minority troops, mostly black and Latino, who exhibited the same split within their own sub populations. Some of us were ready to join the VFW and/or American Legion

The VietNam Veterans of America emerged around the early 1980’s and drew in quite a few vets who wanted nothing to do with the VFW or American Legion. I joined this group, allowed my membership to lapse, re-joined, and relapsed again. While I’ll tell an occasional war story I have no desire to sit around a bar telling them or to attend annual conventions that result in the same thing.

As the 20th century wound down and the WWII vets left us, the VFW and American Legion began to actively court VietNam vets and then the Vets from Granada, Panama, and Desert Storm. About every three months or so I get some mailer from one of them asking me to send them money in exchange for a certificate of some sort to frame and hang on my wall. I routinely throw them away.

I honor my comrades-in-arms; value them for their service, for the common risks we shared and the added risk of combat some of us faced. I don’t want to see any of them reduced to alcoholism or drug abuse by PTSD. But many of them are. The VFW and American Legion have provided some necessary services for veterans. But they also have helped far too many of them drink their selves into a stupor surrounded by others doing the same thing instead of recognizing that pouring ethanol into them was the wrong thing to do. This is another reason I want nothing to do with the VFW or American Legion.

The last time I was on the VA hospital campus I was looking into the faces of people my age and realizing that I wasn’t one of the young vets or even in the middle group anymore. I’m as old now, compared to the Iraq and Afghanistan vets, as the WWI vets were to me. That comes as a shock.

So, while I don’t personally know any Pearl Harbor survivors now, I still know a few WWII vets still. The long line of soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines continues unbroken and the military does not forget its veterans. The nation may ignore them, Congress may underpay them and ignore them, but the men and women who actually wore this nation’s uniform don’t forget those who wore it before them.

Tonight I’m fixing chicken-fried cube steaks, mashed potatoes with mushroom gravy, and steamed corn. In all the years I’ve been cooking for the two of us I have never fixed chicken-fried steak. Such is the evil that comes from watching cooking or foodie programming.