Today, I learned that the original Memorial Day (then called “"Decoration Day”) was created in Charleston, South Carolina, by recently freed slaves who, in 1865, converted a South Carolina racetrack, that had been used as a ruthless Confederate military prison, into memorial grounds. The founders of this holiday exhumed 250 black and white Union soldiers who had died at the site and reburied them with markers and flowers. Not in any way surprisingly, white Confederate sympathizers created a parallel holiday that they called “Memorial Day,” celebrating the Confederate dead. In 1968, the Johnson Administration declared Decoration Day to be a national holiday and changed the name to “Memorial Day.” Interpret that turn of events as you will.
As a member of the Vietnam War generation, the holiday has always had a mixed message. As a dumb, frustrated, rural western Kansas kid who thought his options were played out after a couple of miserable community college semesters, I tried to join the Navy when I was 18, in late 1966. As I’ll describe later, my father was a WWII Navy officer and, sans-the-officer credential, I was sort of following in his footsteps. I didn’t know I had asthma, but the Navy decided I was physically unfit for service and reclassified me to 1Y. Between the spring, when I signed up, and fall, when I was supposed to be inducted, I’d been reading David Halberstam’s New York Times Vietnam reports and he’d convinced me that I didn’t want anything to do with that war. I spent the next 6 years doing what I could to end that fiasco.
Several of my friends didn’t have my luck. Louis Dorsey was the first of several friends who didn’t return from Vietnam. Some that did come back weren’t much better off than those who did. One of the most talented, physically gifted friends I’ve ever had, Don Vest, died at 73 in 2021, but he spent too much of his life trying to find his way back from the horrors of Vietnam. The last time I saw him, probably sometime around 1982, he was not the same guy I’d known in more ways than I can describe.
My father finished his Business BA before he was inducted into the US Navy. As his obituary explained, “Fred entered the U.S. Navy in 1942. He was in Midshipmen's school at Columbia University in New York and received his commission as Ensign in February of 1943. He was sent to North Africa as a small boat officer. Fred was involved in landings at Licata, Sicily; Salerno, Italy; Anzio, Italy; and Southern France. He served as a Gunnery Officer aboard the carrier CVE 80 Petrof Bay.” All of those landings were perilous, but “Southern France” was Normandy, D-Day and the “small boat” was an LST (Landing Ship, Tank). I had no idea how awful his Navy time was, until he suddenly told me the story of his LST war career sometime around 2005 when he was 86-years-old and I was 57, and we were on our way to a college basketball tournament..
Normandy Invasion, June 1944
Before that day, I didn’t know Americans actually crossed the ocean in those glorified flatboats. I always figured they loaded them on to battleships or something and dropped them into the ocean a mile or two from shore. The invasion ships travelled in a great convoy, under the assumption that there is some sort of “safety in numbers” or the “strategy” was something as simple as “if we send off thousands of those silly ships, at least a few of them will get through.” He and four other sailors and about 50 Marines crossed the Atlantic to North Africa, then to Italy, and finally to Normandy. Dad, being a farmboy from eastern Kansas, didn’t know anything about boats and was never gifted with any mechanical skills, a sense of direction or celestial navigation skills, and he had no idea how to captain a ship. In his telling of the story, the other four sailors carried his mostly-useless ass across the ocean and through the first three landings. It really sounded like they put a seat in the front of the boat and told him to “sit there and stay out of the way.”
None the less, it was a complicated story with a high-seas, mid-crossing engine overhaul and, after the relatively easy crossing to North Africa and that invasion, another LST pilot, of higher rank, “claimed” Dad’s boat and dumped Dad’s crew with a near-wreak of a ship and not enough time to do the work. Dad’s crew apparently knew what they were doing and they managed to hang on to that boat until Normandy. Same boat, same 4-man crew, same 50 Marines. On the first pass into Normandy Beach, when the gate dropped for the Marines to run out into the fight, at least half of the group were killed before they made it off of the gate and the rest didn’t even make it to the beach before they were machine-gunned down.
Dad’s LST escaped the beach and returned to the armada, where they were supposed to get in the back of the queue of LSTs waiting to get more soldiers and equipment into the war. And this is where a lifelong prejudice of my father grew wings and claws. The 2nd wave of LSTs were piloted by British officers and crews. According to my father, for many of the politically-connected British officers, that was an unearned “reward” for having been in the fight before the USA joined the Allies. Dad told me that the US Navy watched the British-crewed LSTs dump US Marines hundreds of yards from the Normandy beach, at gunpoint, sending them to their deaths by drowning, heavily laden with a combat load of equipment and ammunition. From then on, US-crewed LSTs started jumping the queue, in front of the British crews, risking their lives and trying to save US Marines from drowning pointlessly.
The story got vague at this point. Years ago, I looked up Dad’s LST and Navy career on the Navy’s website, but all of the links I’d attached to the article I wrote back then are dead now. Dad never, once, pretended that he was the “officer in charge” of his boat. He always made it clear that he was little more than a special passenger. His boat, however, made three trips to the Normandy beach. Watch the first few minutes of “Saving Private Ryan” to get a feel for what that was like. It is especially compelling/terrifying in surround sound. As far as I know, Dad hated everything about the United Kingdom for the rest of his life: and BOTH of his parents were British immigrants.
I have always been a bit baffled by his lack of relationships with the four men he served with on that LST. He never did any of the usual veterans’ stuff, other than maintaining a membership at the local American Legion Club, because that is where he played golf. For many summers, he was an accountant for a local manufacturer: Mayrath Manufacturing. For several of those summers, one of the guys who’d been in his LST crew was a Mayrath’s assembly-line welder, but Dad said they never spoke to each other, ever. When we were kids, Dad let my brother and I play with all of his Navy paraphernalia: clothing, medals, and anything else that caught our eye. When I was in my early-twenties, I converted his khaki officer’s jacket to a full-on hippy suit coat, with peace signs and British motorcycle patches and my wife’s artwork. My grandson has that coat now. Dad made a “respect” joke when he saw it “finished,” but he didn’t seem to care.
Far too late in both of our lives, I realized that he had suffered incredible damage in his WWII experiences. Then, a dozen years after he came back to his “real life,” the love of his life, the reason he did everything that he did to stay alive, my mother, died of cancer in 1957 at 36-years-old. I was almost 9-years-old and my brother was 6. Dad came unglued and I don’t think he ever fully recovered from that awful blow. Maybe, none of us did.
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