With Bowe Bergdahl’s return in the news, the VA scandal, and this last Memorial day I have been thinking of military service, how it serves our country and how it can shape the lives of the soldiers and sailors and Marines who serve.
I never served in the military. I was close to the draft for Viet Nam, but just a year younger than the last issued draft lottery numbers in 1973. I dreaded being drafted. It just didn’t seem like a war we needed to fight. Still, I was drawn to war. I read books all through elementary school about the Revolutionary and Civil wars. I studied the maps of Gettysburg and the Battle of the Bulge. Even in my first year of medical school I devoured the Bruce Catton Civil War histories. But I never got my father to tell me of his time in the great WWII.
Dad was lucky to go to college. He entered Oregon State with scholarships and a job washing dishes in 1938. His junior year Pearl Harbor struck and I’ll bet he weighed his odds just like he did in poker. He enlisted because then he had a better chance at being an officer and thus a slightly better chance at survival. He was no rah-rah gung ho hero. But he could read the cards that were dealt and he knew his hand, so he became a lieutenant in the Army infantry.
One story he willingly told was about ants. Officer Candidate School was his ticket out of the foxholes and a step up in a meritocracy, so he worked hard to qualify and clear the bar to pass. He told of the school somewhere in the South with heat and constant drills. A call to the parade grounds might come at any time. He hung his jacket on a hook behind the door with a half-eaten candy bar in the pocket. Where he grew up in Eastern Oregon, ants were not such a presence, but those Southern ants found that sweet quickly. When a sudden call was given to “Fall in!”, Dad grabbed the coat and stood at attention in rank in the heat and sun. The ants moved from the pocket and swarmed all over him. He told that they began stinging as if on signal; all at once he was getting stung all over. He stood at attention until he passed out.
I gathered that he served through the invasion of Sicily and then up through Italy though he would tell me no stories. I remember how difficult it was to wake him. Mom would be finishing Sunday dinner and say, “Go wake your dad, it’s time for dinner.” He would be napping on the couch or in the bedroom. I went with trepidation, since I’d done this before.
“Dad”, I would say softly. That never worked. I always thought if I could do it just right: “Dad, it’s time for dinner,” a little louder. He would still be asleep. I would reach out and touch, with my own fear, then he would startle, as he always did, his loud “Hunh?” sitting up quickly, alert, sometimes even an arm thrown out just for a second, but it is so frightening to see your father scared.
He was wounded going up The Boot, he called it a million dollar wound, shrapnel in the buttocks. It got him off the line and he survived, that was his goal. He did tell me how he developed his skill at poker going across on the troop ship and coming home. He never told me why he got the Bronze Star. 
He did say, “They gave those to everyone.” His Purple Heart was the ticket home.
My fascination with war has faded as the clear purpose for young men to die for a cause has become so diffuse. Last legislative session the Idaho Senate ceremoniously honored the Idaho military that had fallen in service in the previous year. One family had us note the hymn sung at their son’s funeral, his choice or theirs, I know not, but one that echoed my feelings of these wars we fight and the people we send to kill and be killed; one I have sung too many times in our church and one that still brings tears.