The Greatest Generation / The USS Arizona

Huey Callison

What Tom Brokaw refers to as "The Greatest Generation" is, sadly, dying out as I type this. And we who follow them, their children and grandchildren that grew up hearing the stories, must honor and cherish those stories to such an extent that generations that follow us are aware of their importance, and follow suit in turn.

I grew up around an imposing figure of a man, with tiny wisps of white hair ringing his big bald head, and a face that I imagine a stranger might see as weatherbeaten and angry-looking, but he was the gentlest man I've ever known and I've never felt safer than when I was a child in his presence. He is my grandfather, a combat engineer with the Fifth Marine division in the pacific theatre of WWII. As a small child, I learned from his stories about the 'piss-can' water-cooled machinegun and laughed when I found out why they called it that, and (when I was allowed to hold it) I treasured the homemade K-bar he'd made in a metal shop out of a piece of a leaf spring, and the Garand that hangs over his mantel to this day. Back then, I had no concept of what "150% casualties" meant, or what "seventeen survivors from the original batallion that shipped out" entailed, and it was fully twenty years later, as a US Army soldier visiting the WWII memorial at the punchbowl in Hawaii that I saw order-of-battle maps for Okinawa and realized that his engineer batallion landed in a meat-grinder and spent the next several days fighting through it.

Even after years of military training, I still can't begin to imagine what hell that must have been, how many of his own friends he must have seen die right in front of him, and still he kept going. He returned home carrying the one bullet that he had cut out of himself and bandaged, because his medic was dead, and another that remained in his foot until only just recently, and never received a purple heart - because at the time, Marine regulations specified that only officers could recommend medals, and at that time, all of his OFFICERS were dead. After ten years in the military, my uniform has twice as many pretty ribbons on it as his does, which makes me ashamed of the cheapness of the medals that I have earned, and respectful of the incredible price he must have paid for his. As a small child, my grandfather was larger than life. I really thought that he must have been bulletproof, a sort of superhero, and all of the imperial japanese soldiers on a dozen little pissant islands in the pacific couldn't kill him. And at that moment, as a soldier standing in that war memorial in Hawaii, he was larger still.

Now, neuropathy from diabetes and age have taken the spring from his step. The grand creations from the workshop - the porch swings, the stained-glass windows, the large woodcarvings and hammered brass sculpture - it's done, and there will be no more, except for the occasional small hand-carved christmas ornament or small oil painting. The man who seemed so physically imposing when I was six now shuffles behind a walker. And the small town he lives in asks him to sit in the back of a 56 chevy 210 convertible and wave during the parades, because someone down at the VFW hall let on to them that, this old guy here? He's important. His story is important. You should listen to it, and then you should tell other people.

And he's just one man. One man's life worth of great and terrible stories, heroes and Hitler and Hirohito, and the stories of how many other men and women will fall under the sands of time, unless someone collects them up and sees that they're passed on to someone else who will see the value of them.

During the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II, I had the honor and good fortune to meet, even if only briefly, an Arizona survivor, a Flying Tiger, a Tuskeegee airman, an absolutely insane Korean war Special Forces vet who was insulted that I offered him a ride in a truck ("A TRUCK? You callin me a WIMP? I goddamn walked all the way through that fucking war, and I'm sure as shit gonna walk through this parade!") and some charming old ladies who had been nurses in World War II who, when I wasn't looking, stole a HMMWV (and the lance corporal who was driving it!) from the US Marines.

He looked very sheepish, like he wanted me to find some way of getting him out of it.

After the parade, they gave him, and his truck, back.

If you should see these ladies on your way to the Arizona memorial, you might not want to allow them to climb into the back of your truck, unless you are willing to drive them around all day.

As for myself, I'd be honored to give them a ride in my truck.

Now, when you go to the Arizona memorial, there will be a gaggle of tourists. There will be a couple old guys, some with VFW hats or American Legion hats or navy ship hats, all full of pins and ribbons and rosettes. Most of those old guys will be leaning on something or someone, and have family there, although there might be one or two who come alone. Then, there'll be current military folks, some with parents or kids or both, some just with spouses, and some alone. And then there'll be the rest of the tourists. While you're waiting for the tour to start, it's a relaxed sort of excitement. People will be talking about what they've already seen of the islands, what they're going to see next, where they'll have dinner - it's sort of like waiting in line for a ride at Epcot - it's just another vacation thing that people do. You go to Hawaii, you see the Arizona memorial.

Then the little boat will pull up, and maybe the docent will say something about how the memorial is a gravesite, and suggest that people show some respect, and maybe people will hear it, and if you hear it, you wonder if the other people did, and whether they'll actually pay attention to it.

Then you get on the boat, and everyone starts to get quieter, and you can feel palpable tension in the air. By the time the boat gets to the memorial, almost nobody speaks. The memorial itself is like a strange sort of open-air crypt, and you can look both directly down into the water and off to the front and back, and see parts of the big rusted steel coffin. Someone, maybe a little kid, will ask about the oil that still seeps out. There is always someone standing there looking at that oil, sometimes a few people.

And then there's the list of names on the wall. If there's an old guy there, maybe you'll get a "I knew that guy", or sometimes you'll get a mother telling a small child "that's your uncle Dave's name there", or someone asking "I wonder if we're related to him?" but mostly people just stand there and stare.

Some people stand there and stare for quite a while.

At some point, you and all of the other now much quieter people will file back onto the boat, and go back to the dock, and the air will gradually be let back into the room, but people will still go away quieter than they came. It takes a while to sink in, and it means something different to everybody who sees it, but except for the smallest children, most people seem to grasp the magnitude of the thing. "Here, something terrible happened. We must remember it."

And please, if you overhear any of those old guys telling stories, remember them, bring them back, and tell them to us.

This article originally appeared in Usenet newsgroup alt.fan.cecil-adams, and can be found there in Message-ID: <j6mdnaL6ObnGs1PfRVn-sA@speakeasy.net>

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