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Last Updated 09/06/05
Email: joy@our-town.com
Since we did not have an appointment, I anticipated that the wait at the
doctor’s office would be unusually long. It
was. Four hours to be exact. I could have read War and Peace. I chose Tom Brokaw’s The Greatest Generation,
a collection of stories about ordinary people involved in World War II. My reading selection was an inspired one
because I was sitting with Tom in the waiting room at the Veteran’s Clinic in
Brownwood. The patients waiting in two rows
of chairs were mirrors of the ones I was reading about in Brokaw’s best seller.
Oh there might not have been a Medal of
Honor winner in the room but I suspect there
were some Purple Hearts. No man dozing in a
waiting room chair in relaxed fit pants, and slip-on canvas shoes had a Distinguished
Flying Cross pinned to his button front shirt. Yet there could have been one present. I looked around the room and mentally began to
place these old warriors back 60 years when they were young men called out to gear up and
fight.
There was the spring of youth in their step then and the strength in both mind and
body to answer this country’s call to war. They
were ordinary men, many only 17 or 18, not soldiers, not fighters, just guys living at
home with their parents or recently married with wives and maybe young children. They had grown up in a society where a man’s
word was his reputation, where folks learned to work and work hard for a living. No body had much money it seemed and most were
glad to get any job that paid money. A dollar day was pretty average.
America was still pretty much rural in the ‘30’s so many of the men who
went off to war had been raised on farms. Farm
boys learn early that if something doesn’t work, then they’d better find out how
to fix it so it will. Farm boys also know how
to “make-do” using what they have on hand.
They don’t generally expect anybody to do something for them that they can do
for themselves.
Farm boys usually make dependable soldiers. There
were a whole lot of farm boys in WW 11 who had never been outside the county where they
were born. They saw sights that they never
thought they’d see and had experiences that they found hard to relate later to family
back home. Sometimes, in the darkness of a
bedroom, late at night, some of the awful things they had seen would come back as
tormenting dreams. Then they’d wake up sweating.
Farm boys who went off to war came back to their families changed in many
ways.
There were city boys who went off to war too.
Kids from the concrete and steel of New York City and Chicago and San Francisco
signed up to serve their country. Boys that
had never walked in mud or climbed a cliff or shot a rifle at a fleeing rabbit found
themselves in a foxhole on some little island in the Pacific that nobody had ever heard
of. They learned how to survive being shot
at and death marches and prisoner of war camps. Millions
learned how to die.
I thought about those young men who went off to war and those that didn’t come
back and all those who were seated in this room today, waiting. They looked like ordinary men in their late
70’s and early 80’s. They bore the marks of the usual changes brought on by
gradual aging. You’d be hard pressed to pick out the veterans of WW 11 in a crowd. There is nothing on the outside to show that they
were part of the massive force that saved the free world.
Every chair in the waiting room was
occupied when the door opened and an old soldier came in, leaning heavily on a cane. Two teen-aged girls came with him, one on either
side. They wore denim shorts, sleeveless tee
shirts and thong sandals. One of the girls went over to the window and signed the patient
list. Just then someone was called to see the
doctor, leaving an empty chair. The newcomer
took it.
“Pa Pa, we’ll wait out in the
hall until you go in,” one of the girls said. “She
leaned over, gave him a quick kiss on the cheek and they left.
“You know kids today just don’t appreciate anything,” a man in
coveralls and white athletic shoes said. He
crossed and uncrossed his legs while he waited for someone to comment.
“Well that’s sure a fact,” an overweight man in a gray shirt
replied. “My grandson and his wife throw
away their clothes when they get tired of wearing them, don’t even try to get any
money out of them at a garage sale.” He
scratched his head and shook it like he just couldn’t understand. “Just wad ‘em up and stuff ‘em in a
trash bag for the garbage truck to pick up. I’ve
seen ‘em do it.”
“In my day we dang sure never threw anything away,” a man in a blue cap
that read, ‘Napa Auto Parts’ said. “Heck
I remember owning just one pair of shoes. When the sole got thin, I’d sit in the shoe
shop with one shoe on waiting for the other one to get a half-sole.”
The wife of a still good-looking gentleman, probably pushing 80, spoke up. “We were just down to our last dollar, or
thereabouts, when war broke out. My brother
went off to join the army and my folks moved to California and wound up working in an
aircraft factory. That was sure an experience
for me. I was a teen-ager and had never been
anywhere. I joined the Civil Air Patrol and
took air-craft identification. I can still
identify all those old WW 11 planes that the Confederate Air force flys around the
country.”
“That’s another thing,” the veteran in overalls said. “They’re goin’ to change the name
of that group. They said it’s
politically incorrect, or something. Just
makes my blood boil. Always trying to change
something.”
The conversation went as a perky nurse appeared from time to time in the doorway
and called out a name of one who could now enter the inside waiting room.
I listened and remembered the
‘40’s and the war and never did get around to reading much of the book I had
brought along, but I felt that I had just been listening to The Greatest Generation in
person.