Bombs Away!: Dad Did It All in the War

Releasing the soon-to-be-forgotten Pearl Harbor right around Memorial Day has brought with it some high strangeness. Suddenly every tv channel (including PBS) is awash in Pearl Harbor specials, news reports and documentaries. And there's the President, even, giving a speech marking the 60th anniversary of the attack seven months too early. And people, for the first time?well, at least since the release of Saving Private Ryan?are listening to what America's war veterans have to say.

Question is, can you trust them? Case in point, my dad. My dad was a 26-year Air Force vet. I'm very proud of him, and very proud of what he did for this country. This past Memorial Day, as part of Green Bay's local celebration, he was invited to sit in a tent at an historical park with a bunch of other vets from various wars. All day long, they were supposed to talk and answer questions and tell stories to the visitors who stopped by.

He wasn't particularly looking forward to this, I know. Hell, he was always real hesitant to tell me what sorts of things went on during the Vietnam War. Mostly, I just remember him telling me about "Six-Finger Charlie," a peanut salesman in Thailand. Apart from that, he stayed pretty mum. So I called home Tuesday night to find out how it went.

"So," I asked, "you tell them all about how you fought the Japanese at Pearl Harbor?"

"You bet I did!" he said. "You wouldn't believe it?the bullshit was piling up so fast in that tent it was unbelievable. I was there with some of the oldest people in the world, and when it was over, we had to go around and pick up all the shell casings from all the ammo we fired." He was laughing pretty hard. "I think the most amazing part of all was the time I actually went down on the Arizona."

"Did you tell them about being one of the guys who raised the flag at Iwo Jima, too?"

"Man, I was everywhere."

"He dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, too," my mom added.

"Then I went to Japan, met Hirohito, everything. I knew all the kamikaze pilots, y'know."

"At one point," my mom interjected, "someone came in looking for a pilot who'd flown in Vietnam. Now, you know your dad wasn't a pilot?"

(He was an in-flight refueler, who flew in the belly of a KC-135)

"Yeah, but what the hell?" my dad said. "I told them what they wanted."

Makes you wonder, doesn't it? All these television specials, all these interviews with old men who were there, right in the middle of the action.

I saw a guy on the subway once, wearing a blue and gold "U.S.S. Arizona" baseball cap. It looked like the real thing, and he looked to be the right age, so, fool that I was?this was several years ago?I actually struck up a conversation with him, asking him about what happened that day. He seemed confused at first.

"Oh," he said, finally, reaching for the cap. "You mean this thing?" He pulled it off and looked at it. "I just picked this up at the Army-Navy store a couple years ago."

I bet if I had had a tv crew with me, I would've gotten a different story. Experts and witnesses are so easy to find if it means they're going to be on the television.

Reminds me of an embittered anthropologist I talked to once. Like every other anthropologist, it seems, she'd done her stint on Papua New Guinea (or "PNG," as it's known in the parlance). Unlike most, she came away with a slightly different take on the natives and their strange and primitive customs.

"One of them just came out and said it to me one day," she told me. "He said, 'Yeah, we get you anthropologists around here all the time. We tell them whatever they want to hear. Different story every time.'"

This same native, she said, had a tv and a VCR, and rented movies from a little general store half a mile away. He always made a point to hide them whenever the anthropologists came knocking.

I guess it's an old story?like how after a subway accident, suddenly thousands of people come forward, claiming they were on that very car?or the old joke about the number of hippies who really were at Woodstock. But it just struck me these past couple weeks, ever since the "news" specials being used to plug that new movie started popping up: Why is it that suddenly, almost 60 years after the fact, there are so many more witnesses to the attack on Pearl Harbor than there were actual people there at the time? And my dad among them!