Trying to put my hands on these photos all day yesterday; now, as a new today is upon us, I find them, not at all where I remembered them to be. I’m not sure there’s not something awfully appropriate in that.
So above is my old man as a young man, career Army, visiting family in his hometown Binghamton, N.Y., 1965, a year before I was born, and a couple years from his short deployment to Vietnam, with a full combat tour of Korea still not that far back in his own rearview mirror.
So yeah, I missed Veterans Day. But I remember my Pops, every single goddamn day. A military man to his hard-fought end, an unsparing, sarcastic, unapologetically bombastic, contradictory, steadfast, courageous, devoted, iconoclastic, passionate, outstanding, confounding, resoundingly individual man, one generation shy of being straight off the boat.
For me, he is THE veteran. The first I always think of, the man in uniform from my youth. And then, I quickly remember his brothers. Because they all served, each one, in World War II. My dad was too young; he’s the kid in the group photo. For him, Korea was waiting, age 18, enlisting.
He was, and still is, for me, America. Right to his last fraught minutes, and all those health-troubled final years of remembered battles fought in his nighttime dreams, and, oh, how he hated Trump, unable to fathom how far we’d fallen from being the nation his parents sacrificed everything to come to. He loved his family above himself.
Remembrance, Pops. Salud.
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