Under Two Flags

            My father served in the Army Air Force during World War II.  He began his military service in 1943.  He was 30 years old when he entered into active duty.  I can't imagine - 30.  He had less than a high school education.  They invested in him, training him to be an aircraft mechanic.  During his service, he traveled around the country, from New Jersey to Florida to Texas to California, and while Japan unconditionally surrendered on his birthday, August 14, 1945, before he could be sent overseas, he had been prepared to go to War.  He made real friends in the service.  He was respected in the Air Force, and was quickly promoted to the rank of Sargeant.  Of this he was proud.  They taught him discipline and responsibility.  Also, he was well cared for and entertained.  At USO shows, he saw all of his favorite movie stars - Judy Garland, Bob Hope, Jack Benny, and his absolute favorite, Al Jolsen. (White singers who perform in black face probably wouldn't sell today, but you had to be there.  It was all about the music.)  This is not the life he would have lived on his own. 

His service had an impact on my mother as well, who probably never would have left her family in Philadelphia were it not for an opportunity to spend a few months with her new husband in Florida.

 The Air Force changed their lives.  The experiences gave them perspectives they would not otherwise have had.  One thing their Air Force duty did for me was to document their love affair.  The cedar chest in the back bedroom had a collection of annotated photos they'd sent to each other, letters, post-cards, and my favorite - records that my father made and sent to my mother on which he sings her love songs and tells her how much he's thinking about her.  They're both gone now, but I can still hear a love-struck guy singing to his girl whenever I want - feelings burned into red vinyl.

            I didn't think that my father understood if he was actually a Veteran.  After all, he had not seen combat as many friends and family had.  Dad never went to a VFW hall, and never seemed to relate to Veterans.  He had done nothing special, just served two and a half years in the job of his life, and he was more indebted to the Army than he expected the Army to be to him.

            I was born into a good family who took good care of me.  I was 7 years old in 1958 and  WWII was still fresh in people's minds.  Many of my parents' friends served during the war, and had souvenirs tucked away in their underwear drawers - a hat, a medal, a German coin, a bullet shell.  I collected many of their memories - cherished items that I'll have until I die.  Their feelings were reflected in these proud mementos.

            As we grow, the problems that we stew over change.  When I was young, I played until I cried, not understanding why aching legs and feet wouldn't let me run all through those long summer days and warm summer nights with my little friends.  Fortunately, my parents took me to a doctor who determined that I had flat feet.  For the rest of my young life, I wore orthopedic shoes from Shapiro's in Philadelphia, the company that also made shoes for many of the Phillies and Eagles.  Thankfully they modified normal shoes, such as Hush Puppies, so only I knew that I had a specially made insert to deal with my malady.  Orthopedic - it sounded so . . . lame.  As I became a teenager, I found myself asking those seated around me in school what the assignment was on the board.  I borrowed someone's glasses and realized what I had been missing.  Another glaring defect!  When you first put glasses on, the world stares and laughs, of course.  The girls in 7^th grade used to steal my briefcase (yes, my briefcase) and extract my glasses to pass around.  It was a major point of embarrassment. 

            Then an awareness of issues larger than corrective lenses changed the vision of everyone.  The cold war.  Nuclear capability.  As I was dealing with the humiliation of spectacles in 1962, I was also reading booklets I'd requested by mail such as Handbook H-7, Family Shelter Designs from the Office of Civil Defense/Department of Defense.  I particularly liked design PSD F-61-1, a lean-to fallout shelter with a whopping 128 cubic feet of space, to house three people, and food.  Consider this - a room in which a 6 foot man could stand and sleep, a room 6' x 6' x 6', contains 216 cubic feet.  This structure was little more than half of that - and was supposed to be a shelter from a nuclear storm.  This was before the phrase 'nuclear winter' was even imagined.  Another Civil Defense pamphlet, Fallout Protection, calmly defined terms such as megaton and explained 2000 mph blast waves.  It is clear today that not even JFK's secretary of defense Robert McNamara had a clue, acting like, after a nuclear weapon is detonated, nuclear fallout would be over in a few days, when we would then sweep up and retaliate.  I, the little adult, worked with my parents to almost convert part of our basement to a fallout shelter.

            The Cold War was such a sweet war - a battle of good and evil - and we were good.  We were pure.  Then, Southeast Asia took over the too-small black-and-white cathode ray tubes of our TV sets.  The government invented a new vocabulary, and we were expected to call it a military action.  We did not.  It was The War.  Symbols like the Berlin Wall rapidly became replaced by Kent State and Jackson.  Civil unrest and civil disobedience percolated up into mainstream life, even in the city of Brotherly Love.  Our founding fathers would have expected nothing less. 

            I quickly grew, like my peers, to hate The War, hate the government that kept us in it, and it is unfortunate that we also came to hate those who fought.  They were sellouts.  It was not unusual to see a bunch of long-haired Vietnam vets smoking a joint in front of the VFW hall.  Older Veterans wanted nothing to do with them.  Veterans were no longer older, distinguished gentlemen, but late-blooming hippie losers.  Perhaps that's why we couldn't even call them Veterans.  They only deserved 'vet', lower case v.  There were no parades, no celebrations when they returned, only a bitter, traumatized country.

            Pat C. was a childhood friend, the son of an army lifer.  Pat was never anywhere for more than a year or two, constantly moving as his father was reassigned, but there were at least two periods that his family spent in the Philadelphia area, and these times were when we became friends.  The letter from Pat in California that I kept was typical, decorated on the outside with "Peace in Vietnam - through VICTORY!".  It's actually taken me decades to piece together its place in our history.  The letter was dated June 20, no year.  In it Pat goes on for two pages about a Dodgers game he attended where Don Drysdale set a record and (of course) beat the Phillies in the process.  Drysdale retired in 1969, so Pat must have been at the game on June 8, 1968 when Don pitched 4 scoreless innings against the Phillies to break the major league record of 56 scoreless innings, set by Walter Johnson in 1913.  The Dodgers beat the Phillies 5-3.  A few days before, June 4, Don pitched a shutout.  It was the day of the California Presidential Primary.  Robert Kennedy, who won that election, congratulated Don late that night as he spoke to those who had worked so hard for him.  Shortly after midnight RFK was shot by Sirhan Sirhan.  The world was going mad.  I had no idea how many wars were actually in progress.  Only two months had passed since news of Dr. Martin Luther King's death came out of Memphis.  Reverend King was only 39 years old.  Pat was discussing baseball.  RFK had just been taken from us, not far from my friend Pat, and I was reading a letter about a baseball game.  He had become my military-industrial complex.  I never wrote to him again.  What was happening?

            A year later, 1969, I graduated from high school and went to college with a 1-S student deferment from the draft board nestled in the corner of my wallet - my draft card.  I hated the war.  I protested, wrote letters, and grew hair.  Through it all my parents tolerated me, supported me, and, I believe trusted my judgment.  It taxed their trust in their country, but then the children dying on the TV every day were my age.  It was the most real War we had ever encountered, or so I'm told.  In December 1969, when I was in my first year of college, the draft as we knew it ended.  The Lottery was created.  On the same TV where I watched Philadelphia local Chief Halftown's Cartoon Hour, where we watched children die, we now watched birthdates selected, to determine the order in which we would die.  If your birthday was selected first, #1, then you would be the first to be drafted for that calendar year.  If your birthday was #365, they probably wouldn't get to you before the year was over and you would have dodged a bullet.  The 1-S deferment became good only for the academic year in which you were currently enrolled at college.  In that first draft, my lottery number was 127, although I still had that fragile deferment.  That year they drafted up to 196, so I would have been called.  In 1972, they drew the lottery for 1973.  My birthday was drawn as #11.  In 1973 I was graduating from college, losing all protection.  I was going to be drafted.  Eleven.  I spent that day decorating a t-shirt with a big red, white and blue 11 on it.  It hung on my chest like a bullseye, or it would have if I ever put it on.  I couldn't.  I couldn't let it become me.

            I sprang into action, much more so than my friends, and to this day I don't know why.  Yes I do.  They were all greater than 11.  I talked most with my parents about my feelings, although at that time no one talked about their feelings.  I returned on the #11 trolley (!) from my trip to the Philadelphia ACLU office with lots of pamphlets and books and ideas.  I decided that I was not willing to serve - not in any capacity.  I didn't want to be a vet or a Veteran and I didn't want to be a dead son.  I didn't want to shoot a human being.  I didn't want to participate in this war.

            I read books and studied deferments.  I considered pursuing a 1-O classification, declaring myself as a conscientious objector, which I in fact was, but thousands of young men became Quakers that year to express their objection to violence of any type.  The Army was unwilling to recognize such short-lived expressions of a life dedicated to peace as anything other than a move to avoid the draft - which it was.  Besides, a classification for documented conscientious objectors still required that you work at a job approved by the draft board for two years.  I needed something else.  We were supposed to be Free Birds  - Lynyrd Skynyrd said so.

            My deferment research, studies of a rapidly moving target, suggested that I had some chances, albeit small ones.  Shapiro's wrote a letter about my long problem of flat footedness, implying that they wouldn't hold up to marching and having to stay on my feet.  They'd treated me for years, so I had 

established the problem extensively.  Still, the odds were high that I'd be put into some non-combat position if I had foot problems.  I also got a letter from my sympathetic optometrist, Dr. Cohen, lamenting the problems that would arise should I lose my glasses.  Focusing as best I could for a nearsighted teenager, I looked to Canada.  Canada is where you went to disappear.  It was our understanding that, as deserters, we would be arrested if we ever tried to return from what was presumably a great wilderness where people lived in tents and cabins.  My parents knew I was giving it thought, but not seeing them again just wasn't an option.

            Orthopedic shoes and glasses - these are what I'd be gambling on to get a deferment?  More severe than the discomfort of flat feet was a real deformity.  I needed a deformity to avoid the draft, it appeared.  It seemed to be incredibly simple.  Chop off one toe and it was over.  Even if I messed it up and walked with a cane for the rest of my life, it seemed like an exceedingly small price to pay.  "Toe" moved to the top of my list.  "Chop off toe."  Not extract or remove - chop.  Drama queen.  Need:  hatchet, rags, Bactine (?), friend?  No.  No friend.  This was too messy, too personally and physically messy, to ask someone to participate. 

            The deferment due to psychological problems became a popular option but unfortunately disappeared too fast.   The good news was that unstable people were becoming a draft problem.  In the second half of 1968 at Fort Dix NJ and nearby McGuire AFB there were 96 attempted suicides among 37,000 trainees.  Presumably some were very late attempts at medical deferments.  Nine of the suicide attempts were successful - also nine successful attempts at securing deferments after being drafted.  All had been declared fit for duty in their physical examinations, so emotional stability became a real issue.  Suicides were bad press for the government.  In these times we would not hesitate to become Mash's Klinger if it meant staying alive. 

            The story goes: A guy calls his friends and says, "I won't go to Vietnam, I'd rather kill myself.  I'm going to throw myself off of the bridge."  Then he walks up the Walt Whitman Bridge, or gets dropped off, and patiently waits at the top while his concerned friends call the police who respond and talk him down.  A few visits to the psychologist and he's declared cured for now, but he has a record of psychoneuroses so he gets a medical deferment.  Within a few days, the story gets out and the Walt Whitman Bridge is lined with jumpers.  That's when the police decided that the long line of stinking hippy commies were free to jump away if they'd like.  Unfortunately, Walt Whitman, Ben Franklin and Betsy Ross were not going to be the roads out of this dilemma in Philadelphia.

            Still, as a teenager, I had come to hate what this country stood for and what it was doing to itself and the world.  If nothing else, we thought about the issues a lot.  I learned some things.  I decided that I wasn't going to feel bad about burning a flag because a flag was really just cloth and people shouldn't confuse cloth with freedom and what was good from our past.  The flag was one issue I never had any luck explaining to my father - it was a sacred thing to him, more than cloth.  My green and white ecology flag, a clear variation of the real thing, was never welcome in our home.

            The passing time was now a ticking bomb.  Bitterness consumed those around me.  The government, the flag, the army, the draft - we have to tear it all down.  It's money, it's hate, it's death, it all became too real, too big - Godzilla looming over our national skyline.  Day after day, we sat through the televising of a war - people I knew, or should have known, were napalming the crap out of an entire country.  It was insane.  I had to do something.  Now it was personal.  I wasn't going to participate.  The doctor's letters were in a manila folder in my bedroom.  I had maps to Canada.  I had names of Canadian employment agencies.  I had rags to stop the flow of blood.  Too many questions.  What do you do when you hit bone and the joint doesn't come apart?  I had lists of things you could eat that would throw off urine analyses and suggest diseases - early excursions into applied chemistry.

            Early 1973 (two years after Nixon lied to us and announced "the end is in sight") - Nixon, Kissinger, Nguyen Van Thieu, Le Duc Tho - they talked, they stopped talking, they wrote letters, negotiations stopped, they restarted.  On January 23, 1973, President Nixon announced that an agreement had been reached to 'end the war with peace and honor'.  We didn't even pretend to be listening to the end of that sentence.  Four days later the Paris Peace Accords were signed.  On that same day, January 27, 1973, William Nolde died, cited by some as the last American soldier to die in combat in Vietnam.  Had I been a praying person I would have prayed for William's family, and I hope he is never forgotten.  Also on January 27, Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird announced the end of the draft.  The relief was incredible but the trauma of a nation did not subside overnight.  Forth of July parades continued to crackle and clang through the decade as Veterans continued to pass away and burnout vets began to show signs of aging.  In 1974, President Ford announced a clemency program for draft dodgers and deserters.  More than 22,000 took him up on his offer.  Another eligible 100,000 did not.

            The United States slowly found a new national optimism and, with it, a new national guilt over turning our backs on our own.  In November 1982, we formally welcomed Vietnam Vets home with a memorial - a bleak, black granite slab containing the names of over 58,000 women and men.  Never was the conversion, the correction of lower case to upper case, so emotional.

            The 60's had passed, the 70's and 80's slid by, and for the first time I saw my father confused about some thing that was very simple.  Too few years later he was in a nursing home with Alzheimer's disease or dementia or something not needing further definition.  Frequently he didn't know who I was, but he liked to sing.  Sometimes it would be a song he'd sung as a child, growing up with Italian neighbors in South Philadelphia, like O Solo Mia.  Sometimes it was Oh, Dem Golden Slippers, a minstrel song that dominates the Philadelphia's Mummer's Parade.  Sometimes it was a delayed replay of an event.  He'd remember seeing Al Jolsen live 50 years ago and he'd start to sing Mammy.  It was a recreation - Al Jolsen live at the Rose Bowl entertaining the troops.  Al was telling me how substantial the experience of military service was in my father's life.  With the consuming threat of going to war tucked into his hat, with a photo of my mother, there were many days of heaven for him in the Army.  He had had the proverbial time of his life.  In his last days, his memories served him well when I could not.

            It was a cool October day in 2000 when we buried him.  I was there to stand at my mother's side, there to serve, there to take care of it all.  Personally, I dislike the mindless and dated pageantry of funerals (perhaps as I've disliked many things in the past that were too big to change) but I went through this one for the family. Short service, carry the casket to the hearse, drive out to the cemetery, seated, ready for a few final words  -  and then I could pronounce it as over.

            I felt like I had been physically hit by something when I looked up and saw the casket.  I had no idea this was going to happen. The American flag draped over the coffin snapped in the cold fall wind.  It was not the flag that I had dismissed, not that flag that I had chosen to declare as irrelevant.  It was the flag of his country, and it had wrapped itself around him, protecting and repaying him, thanking him.  There were two Veterans there, two older gentlemen, volunteers, in uniform - a volunteer honor guard.  They had materialized into our drama from nowhere.  They had never met my father, but they stood at attention through the pastor's comments, then folded the flag, then presented it to my mother and thanked her on behalf of the country for my father's service.  I never got the chance to tell them what it meant.  I never got the chance to find out who they were.  Why were they doing this?  Did any of them wear orthopedic shoes?

            Clearly, in the war du jour, Americans are learning how to recite the mantra of hating the war but supporting the warriors, because we now appreciate, or have relearned, that service women and men face difficult situations and discipline demands their preparedness to follow orders.  I think I always knew that Veterans were all heroes who sacrificed for us.  Why else would I have worked so hard but to avoid the sacrifice?  Our arrogance made us too quick to anger in a time when it was easy to ask "how could you?" to a Vietnam vet, when you yourself had not been faced with that instant when you would have had to say - "I will not go, I will not serve, I will humiliate my family, that just doesn't understand, for myself."  Self-centeredness has certainly become the key characteristic of baby boomers, I'm told.                       

            In that cedar chest in the back room there is a long rolled up photograph that must show a hundred men in front of a hanger.  They're not in dress uniform, but dressed to work - dressed in Army coveralls.  Many of them are standing at attention, tall and proud.  When I look into their eyes, I see that many of them were not high school graduates, some had flat feet, many wore glasses, and many of them had spent a month's salary to sit in a recording booth for three minutes to sing to their girl.  I have a feeling that those hundred faces represented more than one night of tears at the thought of shipping out and lying wounded and dying in a rain-filled ditch with only a photo and perhaps a baseball card in their helmet to link them back to this life.  In the back row of the photo, there are two goofballs with smiles and their arms around each other.  They are not defiant smiles; they are not smiling even though they had been ordered to stand tall.  They are smiles of simple happiness.  One smile is on the face of my young father.  He made friends easily and took friendships seriously.  Service during the war was a very good thing for him.  Sometimes when I'd walk into his nursing home room he'd be far away, but he'd be sitting up straight with his head held high.  I've decided that, at these times, he was in his uniform, standing tall and proud, under a flag simpler than mine, understanding it all.

© 2006 John Allison

This was published in The College of New Jersey Review, April 2006