﻿A Civilian's Thoughts on Veterans Day

A Civilian's Thoughts on Veterans Day

11/11/2014

Walter Rudolph, Long Island National Cemetery/ Photo by George Vecsey

On one of her child-care volunteer trips to Asia, my wife sat next to a Vietnam vet, who had business out east.

He told her that a bunch of vets had a network, to send goods to Vietnam. The leader, he said, was John McCain.

As it happened, I had an interview with Sen. McCain during a hearing into some Olympic scandals in 1999. The first thing I asked him, in a long break in his office, was about his involvement with Vietnam after years of captivity.

McCain’s reply was a shrug, more eloquent than words. I think the shrug meant, it was the right thing to do.

I think of those vets who saw horrors out there. One baseball player from Hofstra, John Minutoli, flew one mission too many out of Da Nang. I’ve visited his name on the Wall in DC. Walter Rudolph, a fraternity brother by proxy, died in 1969. I’ve visited his grave at Pinelawn.

Others who came back from combat are still dealing. One good friend of mine is starting to write about being an officer, seeing how things really worked out there in Vietnam. John Fernandez, the West Point lacrosse player, who lost the lower part of both legs on “a bad day at the office” in Iraq, worked many years for Wounded Warriors, still plays on prosthetic feet.

Friends of mine, who were in the worst of it in Vietnam, only allude to the combat but prefer to talk about the politics that prolonged the war.

The older I get, the more I appreciate anybody who served. * * *
(Here are the links for John McDermott's friends, in the Comments below.)

http://www.arlingtoncemetery.net/mwdoyle.htm

http://lifewithldub.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-thanks-norm-for-your-service-story.html

10 Comments

John McDermott

11/11/2014 02:03:29 am

Thank you George. Two dear friends and mentors I think about often, Norm and Mike:
http://lifewithldub.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-thanks-norm-for-your-service-story.html

https://navy.togetherweserved.com/usn/servlet/tws.webapp.WebApp?cmd=ShadowBoxProfile&type=Person&ID=413755

Brian Savin

11/11/2014 01:29:29 pm

My Father served in WWII in the Pacific, in very many serious battles, and I never, until the very end, was able to get him to talk about it - at all. He wasn't interested in celebrating his service. He cut the topic off and really and truly didn't want it mentioned. For me, I had no interest in Vietnam. I thought it political folly using my life as political fodder and somehow didn't get the call. The majority of America thought like me and President Nixon bowed to that sentiment, for the good of an effective fighting force I suppose, and ended the draft. That was both fortunate and unfortunate. The fortunate part is pretty clear. The unfortunate part is that we are engaged, in my view, in a kind of class distinction now. "Support our troops" means life itself to the families whose children have elected to serve. It increasingly rings hollow to the rest. The end of the Citizen Soldier is the a very big change that I don't see our country confronting ably.

George Vecsey

11/12/2014 12:13:37 am

Brian, you are right, the volunteer military does recruit from an economic level that needs money, a way up, an education. The thanks is tinged with guilt, probably.
It is also true that most vets don't talk. I heard from a friend yesterday who I know was in terrible combat up north near the border. His point is, don't talk about what happened around you but look to the reasons we were there.
GV

Mike from Whitestone

11/11/2014 02:53:32 pm

Thanks GV for putting this on the site. Happy Veterans Day to all who served, RIP to all those lost in battle. I put some posters up today in the building, thanked all the guys in the shop too. Can't thank them enough in my opinion. The politics should never block the thanks the soldiers deserve.
Thanks to my dad too, Flatbush Joe served during Korea in the USN. He is proud of that, so am I.
Happy Anniversary to USMC too.

George Vecsey

11/12/2014 12:16:18 am

Mike, I was a kid at the end of WWII. I look back at photos and newsreels and recognize the era. So many men enlisted in Dec. of 1941. I had immense respect for them as a little kid, and still do. GV

Thor A. Larsen

11/14/2014 09:18:12 am

Up until I was 7.5 years old, my mother and I lived under German occupation in Norway while my father served in the US Army. So, I have very personal thanks for all the troops of the many nations who toppled the German army. Being in Norway, we were more fortunate than most but never knew what was coming the next day, a bombing ? a house invasion by Gestapo ?/ etc. I was fortunate to be so young at the time so I did not have the daily stress of my mother and other adult family members. In more recent years, I have made a point to chat with WWII veterans and thank them personally, Every one I connected with those words were so appreciative and would share some of their experiencesI A well known artist from East Hampton I knew served in the Norwegian unit of the US Army and landed in France in 1944 and moved with his comrades up to Belgium etc. My father's brother served as an aid to EIsenhower' staff and also landed in France and traveled with the top brass through Battle of the Bulge. I have started to pull together documents of my uncle with the intention to publish some of their story for a Norwegian-American publication as an honor for those fine individuals and their colleagues.

George Vecsey

11/14/2014 11:56:39 am

Thor, good to hear from you, missed you in Queens. Didn't know this about your background. There are so many sources of material for WW II. I know Belgium was very helpful for stuff about my mom's Irish-Belgian cousin....and Germany had a very helpful center in Essen for some stuff. It's too bad when history passes with the person who lived it. See you soon, GV

Hillel Kuttler link

5/29/2017 03:16:46 am

Thor, I've written two magazine stories involve people in Norway during World War II. Just e-mail me, and I'll send you the links: hk@hillelthescribecommunications.com.

Alan Rubin link

11/20/2014 01:12:51 am

I am of two minds concerning Veterans Day.

It is important to remember all those who served so well and the many who never returned.

Unfortunately, far too many people, including those who sent our young people to unnecessary wars in the first place, only remember for a day. The military and congress forget about the vets the rest of the year.

There are so many good books, far too many to mention here, that discuss our many wars. It is my opinion that the only wars that were necessary for us to participate in were the American Revolution and WWII. Most of the others could have been avoided.

I just finished a disturbing book, “The Invisible Front: Love and Loss in an Era of Endless War” by Yochi Dreazen, which discusses how the military, the VA and congress deals with PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). Actually, it is about how they refuse to deal with it.

The author discusses how it was a cause of dismissal from ROTC programs and career ending in service if it was known that someone was on medication for depression, etc. Military suicides, for both those serving and vets, are now greater than the population at large.

Our society will not truly honor our veterans until PTSD is treated as a illness and not a sign of character weakness.

George Vecsey

11/21/2014 01:37:03 am

Alan, my belated thanks for your reply. I agree with you. That was my Nov. 11 reaction. Veterans generally get a bad deal 364 days of the year. I think of the song Johnn Cash recorded, "Drive On." -- "He said, 'I think my country got a little off track; took 'em 25 years to welcome me back.'" Now we give them parades....and stint on the health care. Drive on. GV

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QUOTES

Measuring Covid Deaths, by David Leonhardt. July 17, 2023. NYT online.
The United States has reached a milestone in the long struggle against Covid: The total number of Americans dying each day — from any cause — is no longer historically abnormal….

After three horrific years, in which Covid has killed more than one million Americans and transformed parts of daily life, the virus has turned into an ordinary illness.

The progress stems mostly from three factors:
First, about three-quarters of U.S. adults have received at least one vaccine shot.
Second, more than three-quarters of Americans have been infected with Covid, providing natural immunity from future symptoms. (About 97 percent of adults fall into at least one of those first two categories.)
Third, post-infection treatments like Paxlovid, which can reduce the severity of symptoms, became widely available last year.
“Nearly every death is preventable,” Dr. Ashish Jha, who was until recently President Biden’s top Covid adviser, told me. “We are at a point where almost everybody who’s up to date on their vaccines and gets treated if they have Covid, they rarely end up in the hospital, they almost never die.”

That is also true for most high-risk people, Jha pointed out, including older adults — like his parents, who are in their 80s — and people whose immune systems are compromised. “Even for most — not all but most —immuno-compromised people, vaccines are actually still quite effective at preventing against serious illness,” he said. “There has been a lot of bad information out there that somehow if you’re immuno-compromised that vaccines don’t work.”

That excess deaths have fallen close to zero helps make this point: If Covid were still a dire threat to large numbers of people, that would show up in the data.

One point of confusion, I think, has been the way that many Americans — including we in the media — have talked about the immuno-compromised. They are a more diverse group than casual discussion often imagines.

Most immuno-compromised people are at little additional risk from Covid — even people with serious conditions, such as multiple sclerosis or a history of many cancers. A much smaller group, such as people who have received kidney transplants or are undergoing active chemotherapy, face higher risks.

Covid’s toll, to be clear, has not fallen to zero. The C.D.C.’s main Covid webpage estimates that about 80 people per day have been dying from the virus in recent weeks, which is equal to about 1 percent of overall daily deaths.

The official number is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death. Other C.D.C. data suggests that almost one-third of official recent Covid deaths have fallen into this category. A study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases came to similar conclusions.

Dr. Shira Doron, the chief infection control officer at Tufts Medicine in Massachusetts, told me that “age is clearly the most substantial risk factor.” Covid’s victims are both older and disproportionately unvaccinated. Given the politics of vaccination, the recent victims are also disproportionately
Republican and white.

Each of these deaths is a tragedy. The deaths that were preventable — because somebody had not received available vaccines and treatments — seem particularly tragic. (Here’s a Times guide to help you think about when to get your next booster shot.)
***

From the great Maureen Dowd:

As I write this, I’m in a deserted newsroom in The Times’s D.C. office. After working at home for two years during Covid, I was elated to get back, so I could wander around and pick up the latest scoop.
But in the last year, there has been only a smattering of people whenever I’m here, with row upon row of empty desks. Sometimes a larger group gets lured in for a meeting with a platter of bagels."

--- Dowd writes about the lost world of journalists clustered in newsrooms at all hours, smoking, drinking, gossipping, making phone calls, typing, editing.
***
"Putting out the paper," we called it.
Much more than nostalgia.
---https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/29/opinion/journalism-newsroom.html