sorry - i'm wordy today...
In 1937 my grandmother sent my father to seminary in Florida. She wanted him to study the Bible and have a career in the Church. For a woman who operated a brothel in post-Depression era Harlem, this was a lofty goal for her only son. He attended for one year and hated it. He wanted to become an engineer and go to college in New York City, but my grandmother refused to pay for it. So my father did what many other young men would do for generations to follow, he joined the Army to pay for college. This was before the GI Bill, so there were no tuition benefits, but my father thought he’d just save his pennies, then return to school after a three year enlistment. His ETS date, the date his enlistment was supposed to be over, was December 8, 1941.
On December 7th, Pearl Harbor was bombed, thrusting the United States into the Second World War. My father’s ETS was suspended, and he was shipped off to the Philippines where he fought with the 3rd Armored Division for three years.
After the War, my father found that he enjoyed military life so he reenlisted, again and again. He traveled the world and later fought in the Korean War. He saw the segregated Army integrate. He helped make history, he lived history.
Eventually, he was sent to Europe where he met and married my mother, who was born in Nazi Germany, who’s father was a Nazi and who lived through the War and had her own (often terrible) stories to tell. He retired in 1964, after serving in the US Army for 26 years. Several years later, my parents and their brood of children moved to the United States, where I was later born.
I grew up with the benefit of having older parents who lived during a very tumultuous time in American and World history. The Great Depression, segregation and the era of Jim Crow, World War Two—from different perspectives, post-War Germany reconstruction, the Korean War, the Civil Rights Movement, the Cold War. My parents lived this history, the good, the crazy, the tragic.
Today is the anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor. You learned about it in school, it’s written about in history books and there are documentaries on television you can watch. But there’s nothing quite like learning about major historical events from people who’ve lived through them.
Of the 60,000 American soldiers, sailors and airmen at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, only about 3,000 are still active enough to be able to travel and share their stories. Next year it will be even fewer.
The bombing of Pear Harbor was a major event that affected the entire planet, and effectively altered the trajectory of the Second World War. Who knows what the outcome would have been if the reluctant United States hadn’t been forced into the War.
But also, if my father had been allowed to ETS on December 8, 1941, he would have eventually gone back to college and it’s likely he would have lived his life in New York, as he planned. He wouldn’t have met my mother and I never would have been born.
When you think about it, the world isn’t so big, and we’re all connected in ways that we wouldn’t ordinarily think. Call it the Butterfly Effect, or Six Degrees or whatever. Somehow, something and or someone on the other side of the planet, either today or tomorrow or sixty-nine years ago, has directly touched your life, and you’re probably not even aware of it.
What major world or historic event has directly affected your life?