World War II

From the day it happened to this sixth anniversary I think about how angry my father would have been about the attacks on September 11, 2001. People of his age (he would have been 87 this coming March) talk about where they were the day Pearl Harbor was bombed. Papa always said that’s when he decided to enlist rather than wait to be drafted. He wanted to be a pilot, a job at first denied to him because he lacked a college education. “All those college boys got killed off pretty quick,” he’d say. “That’s when they created the rank of staff sergeant pilot and turned the rest of us loose.”

After Pearl Harbor our nation knew on whom it was to be turned loose. Hitler, Mussolini, Tojo — all identifiable enemies representative of a dangerous totalistarianism threatening to sweep the globe. The trapped men inside the USS Arizona had to be avenged. And there are other images, images that make tears run down my face as I write. The gallant Poles who went out to meet the Nazi Panzer divisions on horseback armed with pikes, the British soldiers who kept fighting even as they were backed into the sea at Dunkirk, the British citizens who went to get them in anything that would float and then endured the long months of the Blitz, the Resistance fighters all over Europe, the victims of the Holocaust, the boys who died in the surf on Omaha Beach, and in the sea the day the USS Indianapolis went down. There’s a reason we say World War II was the last good war.

On this morning six years ago as I watched the Trade Center Towers collapse live on television I knew I was watching the Pearl Harbor of my generation. I won’t profane this day with talk about the “rightness” of our current war. Although I was born late in my parents’ lives, in 1962, I am a child of World War II. I stand when the flag passes, my eyes fill with tears during the National Anthem, and I openly cry when I hear a bugle blow Taps. And each September 11, I put a small pin on my collar, the World Trade Center Towers wrapped in a black ribbon and covered by the American flag.

My father was a citizen soldier and six years ago men, women, and children who never had the choice to enlist as he did died in the opening battle of a new conflict, one that perhaps we do not yet fully understand and one whose end we cannot yet place in our sights. There were towering acts of heroism that September day. Think today about the firemen and police officers who never hesitated to go into those buildings. Think about the first responders who never hesisted in their determination to reach that smoking pile of rubble to try to help. Think about the soldiers who died at the Pentagon with no opportunity to defend themselves. And think about the passengers on that plane who knew they were going to die and chose to do it on their feet, fighting.

I am not wise enough to answer cosmic questions about the afterlife, but I believe there is a special quiet, a special peace for the people who died this day. There was a song written in 1942 called “There’s a Star-Spangled Banner Waving Somewhere,” which said “only Uncle Sam’s great heroes get to go there.” In the company of heroes may the dead of 9/11 feel our pride and our sorrow on this day.

WWII, 9/11, Pearl Harbor