|
The Tears of War
by Jim
Wallis
My dad came to visit last week.
He's 82 now but still does pretty well, traveling on his own to see his two
grandsons in Washington, D.C. It was the typical yet wonderful grandpa week:
going to see Luke's second-grade class and Jack's new pre-school, watching
both our Little League practice and the big Saturday game, cheering on
Luke's soccer team, checking out the new Sojourners office (he's been to
them all), and eating some special Mexican meals.
Having my father watch from the
stands as I coached Luke's baseball team felt nostalgic and warm when I
recalled how he used to be my Little League baseball coach. I realized Luke
wasn't the only one who was glad to hear that he had done very well.
Tuesday was Luke's personal
sharing day at school (all the kids have one) and so he brought his grandpa
to "share." When Luke told his classmates that his grandpa had been in the
Navy during World War II, one kid asked who won the war. When they heard
that we did, the class started cheering. (And what was the score?) Of
course, at this age, they have almost no idea what war really is.
Later in the week, I took the day
off and went with my dad to the World War II Memorial, now about two years
old. It is the only major national memorial or monument in Washington, D.C.
that my father hadn't seen. And since I hadn't yet visited it either, we
were both curious as to what the enormous project on the Mall, pushed hard
by actor Tom Hanks and former Senator Bob Dole, would be like.
We thought the memorial itself
was nice (lovely fountain) but not overly impressive. My dad liked seeing
the names of all the Pacific islands he remembered as the junior engineering
officer on a destroyer-minesweeper. His ship had been scheduled for the
invasion of Japan, and casualty rates were expected to be very high. Like
many others, my father believed that the atomic bomb might literally have
saved his life and made our family possible. His new bride, waiting at home,
might otherwise have become a young widow.
The World War II Memorial
includes a comfortable stone bench in the shade, where my dad and I talked
for a long time about those war years, his school days, and my parents'
first months and years of marriage - which were dramatically impacted by the
war. Amazingly, he was commissioned in the Navy, graduated from the
University of Michigan, and married all on the same day! The Navy was in a
hurry to get fresh officers into the last days of the Pacific conflict,
which ended only months after he was deployed. He became part of the mop-up
operation in that theater of war after the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki
caused Japan to surrender.
My father recalled the visit he
made to Hiroshima, just weeks after the world's first nuclear explosion had
been detonated there. He was part of a two-man team, surveying the impact of
the bomb on major structures such as factories. The devastation, he told me,
was like nothing he had ever seen or imagined. Just unbelievable. He
described how the nuclear explosion had sucked out all the air in the area,
and when it rushed back in everything was flattened, totally flattened, even
huge factories.
He admitted that he had not been
at all sympathetic to the Japanese after they had attacked Pearl Harbor in
Hawaii, and especially after they and their German allies had killed so many
of his good friends. Along with many of his fellow soldiers, he felt they
deserved the atomic bomb - though at the time, he said, few of them fully
understood what it was. But then he saw Hiroshima. As the two young
Americans were walking through the flattened rubble, they passed by a small
pile of bricks that had been fashioned into a kind of makeshift shelter.
Suddenly, a little girl appeared from behind a wall. My father remembered
her as about 5 years old, with old, dirty tattered clothes falling off her
body. As far as they could see, she was all alone with no one to take care
of her. As he talked about the child, he seemed to remember her vividly, as
if it were yesterday. And he recalled the feelings that welled up inside
him: She was just a little child, none of this was her fault, and she had
nothing to do with it. They knew she would die soon, if only from the
exposure to all that radiation. My dad, an 82-year-old war veteran, began to
cry as he remembered a day more than 60 years ago.
"That's war," he said, "and
that's why I hate it." He still believes that we had to defend ourselves
from a direct attack in World War II. But why did they drop that bomb on
civilian targets, he asked, cities with no military significance? They could
have dropped them in a desert, he said, or a deserted island to make the
point. My dad has opposed every war since then, and is especially upset
about the war in Iraq. "They just lie about it and it was totally
unnecessary," he said, as his tears turned to anger on a sunny day in
Washington, D.C.
My dad is part of what former NBC
anchor Tom Brokaw has named the "greatest generation," and I know two little
boys who, after a week's visit, think he is the greatest grandpa. We all
missed him after he left for home and wish that we lived closer. Luke gave
thanks for him in his prayers before bed, and so did I. But my dad doesn't
like the direction his country has gone since his generation has retired.
Now he often shakes his head while he watches CNN most days. "How do they
get away with it?" he often asks me on the phone. Sitting with him at the memorial, it was moving to see how this war veteran has so turned against war and still feels the emotions that senseless suffering brings up. Most of those who run our wars now are not really veterans of any war, and have little to say about the senseless suffering that now occurs every day. I wonder what would happen to them if a 5-year-old girl came out from behind the rubble of war to stop them in their tracks. But most of them never get close enough to the rubble to see her. |