Combat Veterans

[Chuck Stromme]

There are veterans and there are combat veterans.  You don't have to understand the difference.  They know.

It's hard to get to know a combat vet.  Social interaction isn't their long suit.  If you meet one and you're about their age they have three questions:  When were you there?  Who were you with?  What did you do?  Your answers will tell them all they need to know about you for now.  If you don't understand the questions then you will never, ever understand them.  If you fake the answers, they'll know.

You don't hear these answers any more:  "AEF, in the trenches", "Argonne Forest", "Harlem Hellfighters", "Scapa Flow" or "Hat in the Ring".  Those men are all gone now.  A few of them told their stories, most didn't, as always.  No matter the twists and turns of their later lives, many of their final thoughts were not of family but of men they loved during a day, a month, a year of fighting, a time that changed them forever.  Combat does that.

Fewer and fewer answer those questions with "1st Cav in the Philippines", "the 442nd in Italy", "Kasserine Pass", "8-Ball Express", "The Mighty Eighth", "the 96th on Okinawa", "Tuskegee Airmen", "Iwo", "subs out of Pearl", "82nd Airborne, D-Day", "Stalag", "first in at Buchenwald".  Their time is quickly passing.  Ask them your questions now if you want to hear the answers from someone who was there.  Pretty soon it'll all just be in books and you'll wish you had.  Just don't ask them if they killed someone.  They did.  They remember.

The same for "Pusan", "with Mac at Inchon", "I humped out of Chosin with Chesty and the 1st RCT" and "F-86s up near the Yalu".  Their stories take a different tact, though.  Little ticker tape or bands, few speeches unless you count Mac.  He made a couple of fine ones, including his "Farewell to the Corps".  America was embarrassed because those vets didn't win.  How could that be?  Didn't America always win?  Must have been their fault.  I'm sure I read it in the paper.

You can still sometimes hear "A-6s off of the Kitty Hawk", "Marines at the DMZ", "F-100s out of Tuy Hoa", "Riverine Patrol Craft in the Delta", "Tunnel Rat at Cu Chi", "Chinooks, LZ X-Ray", "1st Cav in Three Corps".  Their time is passing, too.  No parades for them; they didn't win, either.  Must have been their fault.  I saw Cronkite on TV.

Todays vets are winning, sort of, and good for them.  They have their own slang and references, just as their dads and grandpas had.  They were there in "OIF-3", the third year of Operation Iraqi Freedom, "Baghdad, '05", "Kirkuk", "Diala Province", "Tora Bora", "the border mountains".  They called home between patrols, text messaged, told lies about how things were, listened to tales of life and love and longing back home.  They emailed their pictures and told stories of life in a combat zone, sometimes odd stories that people at home couldn't quite understand.  I saw them on Fox.

You can spot combat veterans if you know what to look for.  Men and women who buy their groceries late at night or very early in the morning so they can avoid people, avoid you.  They are the ones just a little older than everyone else in class, trying to catch up and already aware that they may never make it.  He's the burned and maimed guy who is consumed with guilt because he survived the IED and his buddies didn't.  The 60-something guys who show up at The Wall.  The ones whose thoughts drift when they shouldn't, physically here but mentally... there.

They don't complain about food much.  They know mess halls and SOS, C- and K-rations, LRRPs and Meals Rejected by Ethiopians.  The least fortunate of them have eaten grass and maggots just to hang on to life for one more day... for you.

There were enough cross-over WW II/Korea vets that members of the various service organizations (VFW, American Legion and the like) didn't discriminate much between vets from one war or the other.  That wasn't always the case later on.  Just ask any vet who's heard "That wasn't a real war."  Today's service orgs are less visible than before and have less social impact.  Maybe that's because military service is no longer compulsory, therefore vets are a smaller slice of society.  That makes it easier not to notice or care about veterans.  It's easier to denigrate their service if first you believe that they aren't like you.

The press will help you with that.  War coverage is less today than it was forty years ago.  Maybe we had war overload during Vietnam but at least we had regular war reporting.  It was the legacy of WW II giants like Walter Winchell and Eric Sevareid, Ed Murrow and Hayward Hale Broun and Ernie Pyle and Bill Mauldin.  Guys who knew, guys who had seen the elephant.  There won't be any more like them.

Combat veterans are haunted by memories they don't always understand.  What drove a sober Alaskan teacher, 25 years after he came home from Vietnam, to get a full-sized, full-color 1st Cavalry patch - the largest and brightest-yellow patch in the entire Army - tattooed on his left shoulder and a large silver-and-blue Combat Infantryman's Badge tattooed on his left breast... all on the same day?  He'd never had a tattoo in his life.  He couldn't explain it, seemed as surprised as everyone else.  But he did it.  Had to, he said.

"A factor of eight."  That's what one study of combat vets reported.  They suffer negative events - divorce, suicide, alcoholism, addiction, jail, you name it - at eight times the rate of non-combat vets.  They have their own peculiar troubles, too: soldier's heart/shell shock/battle fatigue/PTSD, Agent Orange, Gulf War Syndrome, trench foot, frostbite, malaria.  Suffering that is rare-to-non-existent "back home" has always been the combat veteran's daily grind.  That's a high price to pay, especially considering what they have already paid... for you.

They get angry about things you don't even notice.  One can't get over a Memorial Day sermon about why it's not a day to remember America's fallen warriors but rather to remember all those whom we have cared about who have died.  The preacher who would deny them even a single day of dedicated remembrance.  Other things irritate them, too.  Jane Fonda, of course.  John Kerry - "We were all war criminals".  Japanese and German cars.  POWs left behind... for nothing.  McNamara.  Henry Kissinger - "Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac" - and his Joey.  Preening politicians who never served or sacrificed.  The needless and repeated sacrifices of those soldiers who served after them.

Whatever fragile peace and security, whatever tentative respite and sanity we enjoy today, we owe to combat veterans, folks like Henry Allingham and Bob Wallen and Ed Cherry and Larry Swarbrick and Chance Phelps and millions of others fought for you.  We owe the smiles of our children to men and women like them.  We owe the grace and dignity of our freedom and the future of America to men and women like them. 

Our debt is too big to repay and too big to ignore, but you can try.  It doesn't have to be about money.  Find your own way.  Say thank you.

[Edythe Stromme]

As always, you touch my heart when you open yours. Edythe