Spent as many years in a police uniform as I did a Navy uniform.
Nothing like my father, a career Navy man for over 30 years. WWII vet... while my mother was back in Chicago on a factory line making hand grenades. Luckiest thing to ever happen to Dad might've been contracting a bad case of malaria, complete with delirium, in the New Guinea jungle and being one of the several thousand young men sent home to recover. Malaria was the end of the war for him. (Whereas my uncle served in the Army in WWII, came out of it an alcoholic, and never recovered from that.)
In 1946 Dad was at the Bikini Island atomic bomb tests, the first nuclear explosions since Nagasaki, topside on the USS Ajax as the bombs went off. His old decommissioned battleship USS Arkansas was dead center of the target/ghost fleet of ships that got nuked. They stopped exposing troops to the blasts later. Whether Dad's late life skin cancer was related to Bikini Is. bomb tests, or just from being a blue eyed fair complected sailor in the tropical Pacific sun no one will ever know.
In 1953 my parents were stationed at Naval Air Station Argentia Newfoundland when their 2 year-old 1st child developed problems; at Portsmouth (Virginia) Naval Hospital Pam was diagnosed with a brain tumor. It was removed, mostly, returned, and she died there 6 years later.
In 1962 JFK gave Dad's photographic aviation squadron, VFP-62, a unit commendation after the Cuban Missile Crisis. Their squadron's pilots were the ones flying low in F8 Crusaders reconning the Soviet missile installations. It's presented well in the movie Thirteen Days.
In 1981 Mom, too, died in Portsmouth Naval Hospital, post-op after a poorly done operation. The Navy went through periods when all their surgeons weren't top notch. We were too trusting of military medicine.
We were a Navy family. Where us kids grew up a lot of families were. Military service was the norm, and felt completely natural, not like something special at all. Only in later decades in other parts of the country did I notice a lot of honor starting to be paid servicemen and women.
While it's not really warranted for someone like me, the vets who really deserve thanks are our veterans of foreign wars. The "trigger pullers" most of all. (Well, a cousin of mine was a trigger puller in Vietnam. But he also beat to death a teenaged Vietnamese girl his squad worried might be spying, so him we'll put aside. The kind of soldier that John Kerry would later testify about, he was a PTSD case the rest of his life.)
The Navy got both of my parents off the farm and out of Tennessee cotton fields, and if only for that alone was a good thing, overall, for them and later for us kids.
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just in case.
