World War II

Sometimes I get in sort of a mood about the war. In my house when you said “the war” you meant World War II, unless you were at a family reunion where the phrase could possibly still refer to the Civil War depending upon to whom you were speaking. (It’s a Southern thing.)

I confess I get cranky . . . no . . . I get angry when it seems that veterans and the war as a whole are being forgotten. Sure, I know we’re 66 years out from Pearl Harbor and young people today just look at the war as another question they need to get right to get the hell out of history class. I taught history after all and the indifference of 90 percent of my students to our collective past saddened, tortured, and infuriated me in equal measure back in the day.

But sometimes the neglect can get even more personal than that. I still maintain close ties to the little town in West Texas where I was born. My mother lives there as do many old friends. Several years ago the publisher of the local newspaper, the daughter of the former editor and publisher, himself a WWII vet, wrote a Veteran’s Day article about the town’s servicemen. The thing stretched on column after column and referred to many men both living and dead. It did not refer to my father. You see, the current editor and I have a personal feud. To get to me she ignored and insulted my father’s World War II service and left him out of the piece.

I won’t go into what followed. Suffice it to say I’d be hard put to walk across the street to spit on the woman if she were on fire. Since then, however, I’ve been even more sensitive to the feelings of living veterans who feel they’re forgotten. So this morning when I read this beautiful tribute to Seattle area veteran Al Weddle written by Robert L. Jamieson, Jr. for seattlepi.com, I cried. Yeah, I know, I cry alot about things related to the war. But what struck me most was the guy-to-guy tenderness of the piece. There are few things more touching than the respect of a young man for an old man. And I suspect there are few things old men enjoy more, even if they would never admit it.

At my own father’s funeral I was doing pretty well, holding it in and sucking it up to deliver the eulogy. Then I looked at the back of the church and saw two young men who worked for my Dad sitting erect, trying and failing to keep the tears from rolling down their cheeks. It is one of my most vivid images of that day. Those boys gave me a gift, although they didn’t realize it, in the love and respect they silently expressed for my Dad. And Jamieson’s piece is a gift to Weddle’s family and to World War II vets everywhere because it says, “I remember. I remember you and I remember your stories.” Bravo!

WWII, vets, Al Weddle, Paul Jamieson