Sixty-Five Years

Sixty-five years ago today, who remembers?  Old men in obscurity.  I
assign their grandchildren to go ask; they do not know.  Grandpa won
a Medal of Honor.  What's that?  They don't understand my awe.  He's
just Grandpa. 

I've seen the white cross high in the pass where the airplanes flew
across the island.  Surrounded by green, it looks small from the
highway.  On another mountain, we walked past the ruins of a
warplane, one of ours, buried by jungle.  We thought about wild-boar
attacks instead, and kept watch for trees to climb in case one came
along. 

I asked my teacher to tell about the war; when she was 8, they did
drills at school with gas-masks.  Sirens still run on Sunday every
month, just to be sure.  It's ancient history now, it was my
grandfather's war and he was gone before I was old enough to talk.

Sixty-five years ago today, and even I'd forgotten, but then, one of
my students asks "Isn't today some sort of celebration?  December
7th, 1941?"  Who remembers?

December 7, 2006

I went to Kaiser High School in Hawaii, on the island of Oahu, from 1989 to 1991.  The history of World War II was everywhere, from the downed airplane on the side of a steep hillside I once hiked along, to the barbed-wire fences that ringed Diamond Head, to the white cross on the far side of the island.  I was always intrigued with the men who fought that war, the last in our history that, in my opinion, was fought for a virtuous cause. 

In 2006, as a middle-school science teacher, I offered an extra-credit project to my students to interview any relatives who were veterans of Vietnam or World War II.  Few students did the project, and none could understand why their science teacher had assigned it.  Few of these remarkable men and women are still among us, and I wanted my students to have the same sense of history I had had as a child.  Science subject-matter was not the only, and certainly not the most important, thing I hoped my students would learn. 

I was amazed to discover that the grandfather of one of my twelve year-old students had received the Medal of Honor in World War II.  The boy was certainly the reflection of his grandfather; kind and loyal by nature, respectful, with a noble, strong spirit.  I wrote this poem partly because of the loss of those old men who built all the wealth that our nation enjoys today; partly out of awe for some of my students, who are surely not too different from the boys and girls their grandparents once were.