I sat in front of a young veteran at church this past Sunday. As he and his children prepared to leave, they had quite the discussion about where they should go for dinner, as many local restaurants offered free meals on Veteran’s Day for those who served our country.
Who are these men and women who spent time in the military, voluntarily or conscripted into service? Their images flooded my Facebook feed throughout the weekend, as family members posted photos of Great-great-uncle Otto, a fresh-faced lad in World War I, and Grandma June, one of the 11,000 women who served during the Vietnam era, 90% of them as nurses. How did their days in the military mold and mark them?
I’ve been working with my friend Cindy to publish a shoebox full of letters her father sent home from his days in the Army, 1944-46. When she initially asked me, I was quick to agree, unaware of how close to home the letters would come. My own father left the Buffalo area when drafted at nineteen in 1943, a year before my friend’s dad took his first bus ride as a member of the military. Unlike her treasured pages, Frank Streeter’s letters home were lost or discarded at some point over the last seventy years. I’m envious of Cindy’s preserved shoebox, as I saw no letters and hesitated to ask questions, leaving me with little knowledge of my dad’s service.
I’m grateful for this glimpse of wartime life as described by the young boy from Kenmore, who grew up a few miles from my dad’s boyhood home. Themes running through his correspondence likely echoed in letters home from more than sixteen million military members who served in that terrible time, including my dad.
While I knew that many young men enlisted or were drafted during wartime, I was staggered at how young Duncan Tutton and his fellow soldiers were. When Duncan signed up for military service, he was seventeen. At nineteen, my dad was elderly in comparison, but still an adolescent. Duncan’s early letters were filled with a blend of a teen’s naiveté and bravado, which, as time went on, transitioned into boredom, uncertainty, and a longing for home not fully satisfied by a tin of his mom’s cookies. Neither Duncan nor my dad saw duty on the battlefield, but experienced the remnants of war in occupied Japan and the Philippines .
It’s tempting to glamorize the experiences of veterans, honoring them with a steak dinner or a whispered “thanks for your service,” but the stark reality is two-fold: many never return from war-time, and others are irreversibly changed by what they’ve seen, heard, and felt. The numbers alone are mind-numbing. During World War II, sixteen million men and women served in the military, 291,557 were killed in combat, with 113,842 non-theater deaths. In what remains the most tragic war of my lifetime, more than eight million people served during the Vietnam conflict, with 3,403,000 “in theater,” the rice paddies of Vietnam, not the Riviera or the Palace. The names lost to that war are inscribed on a wall in Washington; the names of those we’ve since lost to trauma and its attendant challenges are inscribed on the hearts of families across the country.
Writing home from Osaka, Japan on Christmas Eve 1945, PFC Tutton expressed wisdom beyond his years: “It sure feels funny writing ‘Christmas Eve’ on a letter home and I hope I never have to do it again. I’m about the only one here in dayroom tonight writing a letter. I guess the rest are out someplace; some getting drunk, maybe to try and forget . . . Somehow this is all I want to do tonight, that and go to church at eleven o’clock. I don’t want to forget this night, strange as it may sound. I want to remember it a long time, at least long enough to make sure it never happens again if I can help it.”
I’m grateful to those who served and to those who serve today. Yet I too resolve with young Duncan Tutton, and I believe my dad as well, to remember what cannot be forgotten.
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