Our Shabbat services a few weeks ago recognized Veterans Day, because this year it fell on Friday. The Star Spangled Banner, God Bless America, America the Beautiful, and My Country ‘tis of Thee replaced some of the traditional melodies, and during a break in the service, our rabbi asked all the veterans who were present to join him at the front of the room.
There were eight or nine of us. How ancient, how broken down we appeared. But then our rabbi asked each of us to give his dates of service and I was astonished to find that I was older than all but two. So this is what I look like to others, I thought to myself glumly. I don’t flatter myself that I look younger than I am, but I don’t want to look any older. As it is, boys and girls as well as men and women volunteer to give me their seats in the subway.
The two oldest veterans served in the Second World War. One of them, now in his nineties, told me that he participated in five invasions, four in Europe, including Sicily and Normandy, and one in the South Pacific. In comparison to his service, mine seems laughably unheroic. I served from 1954 to 1956, in the aftermath of the Korean War, when there was still a draft. It would pleasant to tell you that I trained as a commando, but nobody would believe me. No, I trained as a teletype operator, in a course which taught me how to touch type, a skill for which I’ve long been grateful. Because my score at the end of the course was the highest in the class, I was given a choice of assignments. Alas, all of them were in America, so I chose Fort Totten, a base that dates from the Civil War, in Bayside, Queens.
It turned out to be a plum assignment because, as teletype operators reporting the status of missile batteries along the Atlantic Coast, we had to work shifts – morning, evening, and night – which excused us from kitchen and guard duty. The night shift had so little traffic that we slept on cots by the teletype machines, and rarely were we disturbed. We had ample opportunity to go into Manhattan, where as uniformed soldiers we could watch Broadway plays virtually free, albeit as standees. Those two years were a time for reflection, for reading, for figuring out what I wanted to do with my life (what I figured out proved to be wrong) and it brought me into contact with men from all walks of life. It provided a valuable education.
But by no means did those two years represent a high point in my life. For the oldest veteran in our congregation, in contrast, his service in the armed forces was just that. This was also true of the other veteran of the Second World War that I’ve known. He was a fighter pilot in the Battle of Britain, among the lucky 15% of his cohort from Australia who survived. Later he went on to a distinguished career as a Supreme Court justice in New South Wales. When I first met him, on a freighter traveling from Suva to Hong Kong, he pulled out a photo of himself in uniform, standing with two other pilots, in front of a Spitfire. It was clear that his military service represented for him a supremely important period in his life, a period in which he felt most alive. I’ve heard the same story from Londoners who survived the Blitz. The combination of constant danger, camaraderie, and the sense of total enagement in a great cause probably explains the phenomenon.
The Second World War was the last “just war,” the last war in which the whole population mobilized to fight, whether in the armed services or on the home front. The public willingly made sacrifices in pursuit of this great common purpose. America is so polarized now, its representatives in Congress so deadlocked, that a common purpose seems far away. Do we need a great war to foster a sense of common purpose? One would think that the dangers posed by global warming, our crumbling infrastructure, our second-rate educational system, and the government deficit would provide such a purpose, but thus far it has not emerged and no leader has yet been able to generate one. To be told to go shopping, as President Obama’s predecessor advised us, won’t cut it.
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