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I always go. Here are my thoughts.
I stood in the cold today with a couple of dozen spectators and a few of the surviving veterans of our little town. They wore dress uniforms mostly, and overcoats, to keep their hunched over and frail old bodies protected against the wind beneath a sky the same color as the documentary footage of World War 2 providing most of us with our understanding of their sacrifice.
We stood together and listened to the benediction and some short speeches before a row of granite tablets, you know the kind, listing the names of those killed in battle. Our town, like so many others, maintains a memorial for veterans of The Great War, World War 2, Korea/Vietnam, and Lebanon, Grenada, Panama, Persian Gulf conflicts.
This year the service at MacGregor Park was different. The chorus from our local high school was in attendance this time to sing God Bless America. I could see that the kids were nervous not only about singing, but nervous reading the names of town residents killed in the service. I know they were thinking that some of their names would stand inscribed on cold stone along with those of past conflicts, as they will undoubtedly be sent off to spill their blood in the hot Persian sands.
Unlike their predecessors though, their war will not be a great mobilization to defend democracy, or truth, justice, and the American way, but to secure our place as apex predator in the global food chain. As they sang I wept, their voices were so innocent, so beautiful, and so unknowing.
I attended this year’s service, as I do every year, to honor my father and late grandfather and thank them for their self-sacrifice. Though neither was killed in combat they carry and carried both the physical and psychological scars of battle, or innocence lost to fire fights and Kamikaze planes, to the jungles of Southeast Asia and to the oceans of the South Pacific.
My grandfather, Jean Paul Bourbeau, was a sailor, Boatswain’s Mate aboard the USS Bunker Hill. A carpenter by trade, he enlisted at 18, and like millions of others of his generation, trudged off to defend America from outside aggression. During the brief interim between basic training and shipping out he met, married, and honeymooned with the woman who would become my Grandmother. They had two days together as a married couple before he departed to join his ship and head to the Pacific.
His job, aside from ferrying officers from one boat to another, was to count and maintain the body bags brought above decks after an attack.
During the invasion of Okinawa his vessel suffered two Kamikaze hits. He was wounded as a piece of a suicide plane entered and exited his belly, taking much of his stomach with it. That day he joined 263 other wounded, 43 missing, and 364 killed aboard his carrier on the casualty list.
He showed me the scar, a jagged angry fold of stitched skin above his belly button, one summer while we were at the beach. He said that the wound didn’t make itself known until he collapsed from internal bleeding. There was too much going on, he said, fires to fight, ammunition to carry, wounded to drag, dead to identify, and body bags prepare.
He was patched up aboard ship and sent to the Bremerton Naval Base in Washington, unconscious. My grandmother was notified and she undertook a solo train trip across country to join him. Upon her arrival the chaplain there told her that Jean Paul wasn’t expected to live for very long. She braced herself and entered. Beneath his bunk lay a coffin, his coffin.
My grandfather languished there for months alternating between morphine induced peace and searing unholy pain, until, eventually, and miraculously, he healed and was sent home. For his trouble he received a Purple Heart and enough pension to buy a small house for his new family.
Jean-Paul Bourbeau worked the looms at Berkshire Hathaway, and later as a carpenter at Paulding Mills. He filled his spare time with digging clams and carpentry work. Being busy meant he didn’t have to think about the past, and to supplement his low pay from the mill.
He lost his mind, a little, in 1954 during Hurricane Carol when the bridge was swept away releasing the ghosts of dead friends and reopening his memories of the chaos of the fighting. Perhaps it was the roaring wind so like the roar of battle, or the rain that pelted him like bullets, he never spoke about it, but he was different from then on, quiet, moody, and distant.
At night he dulled his nightmares with beer, Carling Black Label, and endless hours of television. Staring vacantly into the tube as Lawrence Welk conducted Polka music or the idiots on Hee Haw made slack jawed faces. He stared as if he was standing on some flight deck somewhere, watching for the planes on the horizon. Sometimes he white-knuckled the arms of his recliner.
Jean Paul Bourbeau disappeared on Thanksgiving in 1983 and was later found, as if sleeping, in the backseat of his old Buick behind a restaurant in the North end of New Bedford. At last at peace, he was buried without much fanfare, only a little flag beside his headstone to commemorate an American life.
Like so many other veterans, when he spoke of his war experiences, it was rare, and vague, and cautionary. He sat on the concrete porch with me a few months before his death, beer in hand, and warned me, “sometimes I think the lucky ones didn’t come back.”
I never understood that until today, watching the old men in their dress uniforms holding back tears for friends lost and horrors past and knowing that for all their sacrifice we haven’t moved ahead. As I listened to the chorus today I thought of my Grandfather, and of my father, and of the countless other veterans whose names sit, inscribed in granite, and of those still among us who battle the nightmares of their past.
And I thought of the kids nervously clutching lyric sheets to America the Beautiful, their innocent worried faces unable to comprehend the lives of the old men listening there, and unaware of their nightmares to come.
I have made it a family tradition to participate in Veterans Day services and remembrances here in New Hampshire, and I intend to teach my son to do the same. The day is far to important to be left to mattress and appliance sales, to lonely old men and cold stone monuments. Our veterans, all veterans, whether serving by circumstance or their own personal choice, deserve more; they deserve our gratitude and our support.
I call my Dad every Veterans Day and thank him, and I thank all the veterans with whom I work personally, and their humility humbles me. My father, Robert Louis DeRego, served in Vietnam from 1961-1964 with the Green Berets. My Grandfather, Jean Paul Bourbeau served aboard the USS Bunker Hill, until wounded, during the invasion of Okinawa, May 11th 1945.
On each Veterans Day I find a poem or poems that express the cost of war and send them to friends and family. This year I send the following.
It Is This Way with Men
by CK Williams
They are pounded into the earth
like nails; move an inch,
they are driven down again.
The earth is sore with them.
It is a spiny fruit
that has lost hope
of being raised and eaten.
It can only ripen and ripen.
And men, they too are wounded.
They too are sifted from their loss
and are without hope. The core
softens. The pure flesh softens
and melts. There are thorns, there
are the dark seeds, and they end.
And this one by Siegfried Sassoon
Does it Matter?
Does it matter?—losing your legs?...
For people will always be kind,
And you need not show that you mind
When the others come in after hunting
To gobble their muffins and eggs.
Does it matter ?—losing your sight?...
There's such splendid work for the blind;
And people will always be kind,
As you sit on the terrace remembering
And turning your face to the light.
Do they matter?—those dreams from the pit?...
You can drink and forget and be glad,
And people won't say that you're mad;
For they'll know you've fought for your country
And no one will worry a bit.
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