For the greatest generation
A number of months ago I read a post on the discussion board of the Marion web site. The writer was complaining about the editor of the Marion County Record (for the umpty-eleventh time). In this particular post the writer grumbled that the editor wrote too much about his World War II experiences. I believe there were slings and arrows from other Marion web readers who agreed.
The message was that it is time to come into the millennium and be relevant; time to quit reliving those war years and telling those old tales about which no one cares anymore.
The terms pompous and self-absorbed come to mind.
What is happening here?
We are a scant 50-plus years from the Normandy invasion, the Battle of the Bulge, Corregidor, Anzio, Pearl Harbor, and Bataan. Those fresh-faced 18-, 19-, and 20-year-olds who went off to save our country are now in the autumn of their years. Many are gone already and their stories have gone with them.
My own father and my father-in-law have been dead for more than a decade. I know little of what they experienced in the European and Pacific theaters. They simply never discussed it. I never asked. My husband never asked. Their stories are gone forever just as surely as they would have been if either or both had died in battle.
Elsewhere in this paper is an interview Janet Post did last week with Gene Obee from Burns. Gene was 17 when he enlisted. At the age when my children and yours go off to college, Gene was fighting to make it through just one more day as an American soldier in a German prison camp. He ate peelings from the garbage. He and his fellow prisoners stood for hours barefoot in the snow at the whim of a Nazi guard. He was expected to survive for days on a loaf of bread and a small tin of cheese.
He told Janet that his time in the camps is a blur — a collage of memories without sequence. But he remembers not thinking about the future. None of them thought about the future. The goal was to make it to dawn and then start over. What could be more bleak? But he was a soldier, as were his fellow prisoners — as were my dad, my father-in-law, my employer, and thousands of others. They fought on.
The words pompous and self-absorbed do NOT come to mind.
When you watch the colors go by on this Fourth of July, rise and place your hand over your heart. The red, white, and blue are in front of you only because those thousands of fresh-faced young men of a half century ago did what they needed to do to allow you to be standing where you are. Honor them. Do not tell them they are irrelevant. Do not denigrate their lives and experiences. They have fought and they are weary. They have seen and done things none of us can comprehend.
We owe them our thanks. Let them tell their stories. They are stories we need to hear. We need to know so we will not forget. Let us not be pompous and self-absorbed. Let us listen.
— SUSAN MARSHALL
