I tend toward the sentimental if I indulge too much in celebrating holidays. Memorial Day, July 4th, Mother’s Day and Father’s Day all cascade in a pile of celebrations , all evoke fading recollections of my beloved parents and their trials and tribulations as I was growing up . They were part of what is often called the “Greatest Generation.” This is because they endured the Great Depression and World War II. I am sometimes referred to derisively as a “Boomer.” But I am not a “Boomer,” I am a “War Baby.” a reference to those of us born during World War II.
The phrase “War Baby” carries slightly salacious implications of desperate unions born of romantic passions and of wartime fear and excitement. There were impulsive wartime weddings as men tried to leave a legacy behind in the form of a pregnant wife as they departed for the European or the Pacific Theater, both killing fields for untried and inexperienced young men.. Even so, wartime unions seemed to wear well and to endure. Divorces were still uncommon in the late 1940’s and 1950’s. So, we “War Babies,” despite the troubled world we were entering, enjoyed being the product of stable and enduring (if sometimes strained and stormy) marriages.
War cast a long benediction over my generation. When television arrived, we watched “Victory at Sea,” a compilation of official US Navy films taken of the greatest naval battles fought before or since. And, countless films and TV shows portrayed the passions and tragedies of the recently ended war, Dramatized on silver movie screens and countless TV shows, the war lived on in our living rooms through out the fifties and into the sixties.
By the time I reached high school and enrolled in ROTC, much of our relief from outdoor close- order drill came from old, black-and-white official US Army films of the European campaigns in Europe, from D-Day until the fall of Berlin. I was well schooled in the story of World War II.
The heartening victory we won and the preeminence the US enjoyed in those years ground slowly down into nagging fear and eternal preparation for nuclear war. The existential threat from the Soviet Union and communism dominated the late fifties and sixties. The continuing admiration of the public for those who served in World War II certainly eclipsed any gratitude we expressed publicly for the sacrifices of those who served in Vietnam. I think this loss of certainty helped to define a new generation of young people who questioned every tradition and challenged every source of authority. Vietnam was the acid that dissolved the bonds between the “Greatest” and later generations.
My parents and their generation were great, none the less. Every generation bears its share of burdens, its ration of fear, and produces its own newborn doubts and ideals. My feeling as a boy was simply that we lived in the safest and most powerful country in the world. The seemingly over-night development of nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles by the Soviet Union inspired a dread, and our response pushed our nation into an ill-considered struggle in Southeast Asia. Vietnam claimed many of my contemporaries. War Babies who died in war.
Remembering my parents is painful in historical context, so I seldom feel excited about national holidays. Instead, I focus on two things. First, I revisit my parents in memory and try to find encouragement in the knowledge that they married for love and struggled hard to make a place of security for their children. Few parents ever succeed completely in this undertaking. But we can find some happiness in keeping the best memories alive. Now, as an adult with many failures of my own to answer for, I can see my parents in context, and see what I once imagined to be their tragic failures as, in reality, courageous struggles, tests of character that might well have defeated me as well.
Secondly, I have begun to pray for my deceased parents. Perhaps this is driven by my own awareness of my mortality. Whatever inspired this, my mother and father become, at least in my prayers, alive. True, they are guardians now who cannot answer my questions or calm my fears, but perhaps in the spiritual realm they can hear my intercessions and know that I remember them with love. In this there is peace for me, as old complaints and disappointments at last fade.
A lovely tribute to your parents and a reminder to this reader to reflect on my own gratitude – and perhaps offer a prayer to my mom and dad who spent their adult lives in the armed forces. And that means, as you can imagine, me too.
This is a balanced, very thoughtful effort to express what all of us “of a certain age” are feeling right now, Joe. Thanks!
Another Beauty!