by Alice Rush
I DON’T think that my father had the most altruistic of motives when he joined the war in 1942. He had a good heart, but I really don’t think it was about trying to relieve other countries from persecution. I think it was more somewhere in between following in his older brother’s footsteps, and fighting to protect his home country, the United States. It’s nice to think that so many of the greatest generation signed up to defend others, but it took the attack on Pearl Harbor to bring home the reality for our government, and I think also so many men who enlisted.
My father wouldn’t talk about the war, so I have no firm idea what his motivation was. He was not proud of his service. I can recall him telling me once that he didn’t do anything important. I had probably asked after watching some war movie with him and assuming that he had worked like the heroes in the movie.
He served on several ships in the U.S. Navy, doing what needed to be done to maintain the ship. He learned to be a pipefitter. When he came home on a leave in 1943, my parents, among the “starcrossed” lovers of WWII, got married. Then when the war ended he tried to shrug off the blue-collar world that he had grown up in and had further learned in the Navy, but it stuck with him throughout his life, and he became a plumber in the local union to support his growing family.
THESE MEN didn’t talk about their traumas. I only heard about my father’s through my mother, who explained that when parts of a ship were hit, those parts were closed off and locked up to prevent the ship from sinking. Men were trapped inside, in the water and whatever else flowed in when the damage occurred. As a pipefitter, my father would be one to assist with making repairs and in doing so, he saw what came out of the closed off damaged sections of the ship. War is ugly all the way around.
It is often difficult for me to find good things to say about my father. The demons of his less-than-happy upbringing followed by the war, then followed by family sooner than he planned, caused him too much stress I guess, and he chose the wrong outlet for it in drinking. He was an alcoholic for my entire life. Still, I keep the flag from his memorial service, and many of his Navy mementoes. These things and others from my father’s early years remind me that before my time, there was a different man. There was a man who no matter what the underlying motivation (everyone had their personal reasons), did what he could to change the direction of his world.
*Alice is a Maine realtor and a licensed helicopter and fixed wing pilot. She first met her Dutch husband in Maryland in 2005, and married him four years later.
