A Day to Remember

Art – amen! I have been chomping at the bit to share a story. This is a good place and appropriate to the day. Sorry if the politics offends anyone.

My granddaughter, Hailey, just married a U.S. Marine, Mike. He’s attached to a unit that repairs and refurbishes weapons. They live in off-base housing near Camp Lejeune, in North Carolina. Mike insisted they get a nice house since he did not expect to be deployed. “They send the weapons to me”, he told me.

Of course, about two weeks ago, Mike got deployment orders. He was to go somewhere on the Baltic where we were assembling military might to impress the Russians. Hailey and Mike were disappointed, but they also knew that Mike’s role was important. Last week he shipped off to the Baltic. Two days after he left, there was a short in the fuse box at their house. Hailey was home alone with their two dogs when she smelled smoke coming from the garage. She went to explore, but the door handle was too hot to touch. She got the two dogs out of the house and called 9-1-1.

Everything in the garage was destroyed and all of the contents of the house were ruined by smoke damage. Hailey was able to get the Marines to find Mike on board a ship heading for the Baltics and they sent him home.

The other day Mike and Hailey called me to discuss making a claim for their fire losses. It was the same day President Obama laid a wreath in Hiroshima will talking about the “death from the sky” that the United States had inflicted on the city to end World War II.

Hailey mentioned Obama’s Japanese visit and asked me what I thought. In my mind, I saw my father’s Navy Flight jacket hanging in the front hall closet of our old home in Evanston. My father – who served as a Pacific theatre combat photographer for both the Navy and the Marine corp in WWII – had told me that the jacket was issued to him in preparation for the invasion of Japan “If that had happened,” he said “you might not have ever been born. A lot of us would have been killed in that invasion”.

I recounted this for Hailey and Mike, and added that Hailey, too, might not have been born if Truman hadn’t decided to use the nuclear bomb. I told them I wished Obama would have mentioned that.

And, so, on this Memorial Day, I not only remember those who died in defense of our freedoms, I also remember those who lived only because a brave leader was able to make one of the toughest decisions a president ever had to make.