"An America I Remember"...Nostalgia for Post WWII Babies/and Newbies

[KoKo]

An America I remember
By Jerry Mazza
Online Journal Contributing Writer
Mar 3, 2006, 01:21

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I was born in 1938, when Hitler was busy gobbling up Europe with the help of some American bankers and elites: Prescott Bush, his father-in-law George Herbert Walker, the Harriman Brothers, Henry Ford and Thomas Watson of IBM, to mention a few. Yet on December 7, 1941, a crisp cold Sunday morning in Brooklyn, New York, at the age of three, knowing nothing from nothing, I can remember FDR’s voice on the radio, talking about “a date which would live in infamy” and then declaring war on Japan for its attack on Pearl Harbor.

My grandfather, Raphael, a naturalized citizen from Naples, Italy, stood next to me, shaking his head. My aunt, Fanny, unmarried and living at home, ran in from the kitchen through the dining room to the living room of the railroad flat to the big wooden Philco. Tears came to her eyes as Roosevelt spoke. She thought of her three brothers, two at church, the third wandering somewhere, who would be asked to go.

When my parents came home from church, my aunt, Milly, my uncles, Arthur and Tony, I blurted out, “There’s a war, there’s a war, the president said.” After the initial shock, Aunt Fanny and Grandpa filled everyone in, in English and Italian. The boys knew they would go. Uncle Jimmy, who suffered from emotional problems from the time he was a boy, would be called up, too, and given an honorable discharge not too soon after.

Jimmy couldn’t deal with authority. He fought with officers. He was a street fighter from boyhood, a thorn in the family’s side for as long as anyone could remember. Grandpa said Jimmy had fallen on his head, on a stone stoop as a child, and this must have knocked something loose. Grandpa’s diagnosis aside, we all still loved and tried to protect Jimmy from life and from himself. And so he came back home for a while, while Tony and Arthur went off.

(More about a kid's experience growing up when WAR was ALL THERE WAS)....here at...

http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_559.shtml

[TomInTib]

1. Thank you, thank you, thank you...

Absolutely beautiful.

[Selatius]

2. This part hit me like a punch in the stomach:

"We had avenged Pearl Harbor, we had avenged the camps. An eye for an eye, as Ghandhi said, had made the world blind. We had won the war but a larger battle had begun. Between remaining enemies and ourselves, between forces of fascism that were not defeated, but lived on, even in NATO, into present time, disguised, ready to begin the onslaught against the American people and their laws and institutions that bring us to the world of today.

And suddenly the America I remembered begins to fade into pictures of Fallujah, Baghdad, Tikrit. My beloved uncles who came home and were embraced, who married, had families, got jobs were now fighting as another generation of young men in even more menacing uniforms, armored vehicles, thunderous jets. Yet the family we were as a people seemed to fall apart, into the same factions we suffered in the Vietnam War."

[HockeyMom]

3. Similar to my parents stories

I was born in 1948 to an Italian/Irish family in Manhattan. My Dad was the youngest of a family of 4 children. His two older sisters were married with families. Both he and his single older brother lived at home with their widowed, invalid Mom. When war came, they both got their draft notices. My uncle, who also had some medical problems, was eventually given a deferment as the sole support to his invalid Mom. My Dad was the one drafted. He was 24. My Dad served in Africa under Patton and later in Italy.

My Mom had one younger brother. He was just out of high school. As soon as he heard we were going to war, he enlisted in the Air Force at the age of 19. To both Mom and Grandma he was just a kid. Both of them told me how terrified they were that as a brash teenager, he was never going to make it out alive. Mom said Grandma used to cry herself to sleep every night. Uncle Sal became a paratrooper over the Pacific. Yes, he did make it out alive.

My father-in-law was also drafted at the age of 24. Of all the older relatives in the family, he seemed to have endured the most. He served in Germany, which was very hard for a German/American. He also was with the unit that liberated Buchenwald. Very, very horrible experience for him. He didn't talk much about it other than to say, "The blood of those bastards flows in my views." It haunted him for the rest of his life. He also took shrapnel in the head, which caused severe medical problems for the rest of his life.

War is not pretty. That is what I have learned from my relatives who fought in WW2.

[ribrepin]

4. Beautiful

Nominated for greatest!

[KoKo]

5. There are so many layers to this remeberance...that on could pull out

and apply to today.

Thanks to those of you who liked reading this...and to "ONLINE JOURNAL" for giving it a "view."

It seemed a good read for the diversity here on DU...and as I said...there's alot of "nuances and things to think about" in this piece.

Glad a few of you read it and could understand it....:-)'s

So much of my family went through this and I heard the stories as a little kid that it seemed important to post it for a wider audience. Figuring that there are folks on DU who like "ME" remember what WAR really means and how much we've learned in the later years.....:-(

[S B]

6. An America I remember

I was only a twinkle in my dad's eye when he went off to WWII.
He was an anti-tank gunner during the war, was in the Battle of the Bulge and 2 other major battles, and an MP during the occupation.
He didn't/wouldn't talk about the war at all, except about the people coming out of the concentration camps. He said "I will never understand how one human being could do that to another". I know we entered that war for other reasons - no war has ever been fought for humanitarian reasons. That war had a identifiable enemy, a reason for being there and a specific objective - to win - and thankfully people were saved as a side effect of that victory, along with getting rid of those insane, imperialistic rulers.
Much different than what we have now, with our let's have a war because we want to, just kidding, let's throw bodies out there without adequate troops and equipment, kill whoever, hang around and settle when we can install whatever business we want there or - oops, we screwed up, bye bye now. Just wrong. (Now we have those insane, imperialistic rulers - can we ever rid ourselves of them?)
I remember my dad's expression and the things he said while watching the news during Viet Nam and the Gulf War. I have friends and relatives who fought in Viet Nam, and I have clients who fought in later wars. There is a marked difference in attitude and effect on a person when you know what you are fighting for and find it personally acceptable, and when you are fighting for something which is not congruent with your inner values - and you discover it too late because there you are stuck there in the hell of it.
I would like to be able to trust my government.
Today, it is oil. Their oil, not ours. Their country has little more to provide for them - just look at the place - barren. Why can't we just buy the oil, trade for it? Why do we have to go in there and control it? That just seems dishonest and underhanded to me.
Sorry if this is out of place. I am just so upset over all this.

[Ben Ceremos]

7. Your naivete

is disarming. We can live in peace, but we have to want it. Peace to you, from me...pass it on.