This morning my uncle, my mother's older brother, died after a sustained illness. In truth, a fair judgement is that his was a failed life; with fierce early promise burnt to ashes by that most fateful of the Furies, our own character. But when he was very young and, yes, brave, he enlisted at age 17 in the Navy after Pearl Harbor. He was assigned as a machine gunner to a landing support patrol boat in the Pacific, was wounded both at Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima, and years later had only medals and photographs to flesh out the horror of those battles for his nephews. [which, properly, he did not do until we were adults].
By the end of his days he had made peace with life, and was a good friend to my mother and myself in dark moments. I shall miss him. RIP.
[Images from the two battles.....Apologies for the editing, was trying to get in shots which mark that these battles were as much of the air as of land and sea.
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8 comments:
Condolences, AA.
Thanks for sharing this, AA. My thoughts are with you and your family.
What a helluva world war, and one hell of a 20th century.
The Greatest Generation. We owe them a lot. By comparison, the Boomers are midgets. RiP.
The Greatest Generation did what they had to do, just like any one of us would've, and then Tom Brokaw came along and made millions off them. Wonderful.
He was right to chronicle their character in a high-profile way. We need an Ambrose Bierce for our generation, I am afraid.
Brokaw is sucking up all their Social Security, and they willingly fork it over.
One could also make the cause-and-effect argument that a Greatest Generation wouldn't have had to blast their way through Nazi Europe and the Pacific Theatre if they wouldn't have buried their heads in the post-WWI Isolationist sand. I chat with most of them honestly like this, and I'm always taken aback first by their agreeableness, and second by their humility.
I tend to side with Hitchens in that history isn't a morality tale, it's a tragedy. Then again, even tragedies can be morality tales.
You meant Bierce, and not Stephen Ambrose, yes JJ?
I sat down with my great uncle — a WWII front line medic — a few years ago with a tape recorder, and archived his experiences and memoirs with this Veterans History Project. He had all those memories bottled up inside his head and wouldn't talk to anyone about them until I started chatting with him but a couple years ago. My family kept asking me, "What'd you say to him to make him talk about it?" I said, "I don't know. I just think he was ready."
awesome, mft
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