Our father’s older brother just turned 21 when Pearl Harbor was bombed.
He had just finished the first half of his second year of college in what would turn out to be a brilliant career as a heart surgeon.
December 8th he put all that on hold and enlisted in the United States Army. Over the past 10 years or so we had an sometimes frequent sometimes infrequent email relationship. It ended September 2010 when he passed away.
Around this time of year we once asked him how he felt on the December 7.
“I was afraid we were going to lose, jackass that’s why I joined up,” he said
Our uncle did not suffer fools lightly even those he was related to.
We thought of our uncle’s response today as we were driving and on the radio an interview was played of another WWII vet.
That vet’s answer to the same question, we posed to our uncler was as different as night is to day.
“I knew we would win,” the radio vet said. “Because I had faith in my country.”
While certainly more polite and inspiring than my uncle’s answer, we think our uncle’s answer was a bit more honest and also in a way just as inspiring as the radio vet’s.
We were after all creamed on December 7, 1941. Our Pacific fleet was all but destroyed, our army was under manned, under equipped and under funded. things looked so bad that is was Germany which declared war on America and not the other way around.
And our new allies Britain and the Soviet Union were and had been getting the snot knocked out of them for two years.
Things must have looked pretty bleak on December 8, 1941 especially for any man aged 17-25.
Yet they joined up not in the hundreds or even the thousands but by the millions. and they continued to join even as the Japanese jugurnaut deafeated American forces throught the pacific. they joined up even after German Uboats sunk millions of tons of shipping and killed thousand of US sailors.
Still they joined and they fought.
And they won.
Their victory was not a foregone conclusion despite what some historians say, and even if it ws most of them didn’t believe it, or didn’t believe it wholey at the time.
And even if the triumph of the nation was assured the individual survival of those soldiers and sailors was surely and often in doubt.
Our uncle hit the beach in north Africa in 1942 and but for a mistep here a bit of bad luck there he would not have been around to call us a jackass 70 years later.
There is but one word to describe those men who when things looked so bleak took it upon themselves to save the world.
And that word is hero.