Falklore: Veteran’s Day

The onset of World War II is when my friends and I grew up. We were in our early teens in 1941, and the war was difficult to grasp until the sadness began to affect our families, neighbors and finally, ourselves.

We didn’t know what real war was like, not like our European counterparts. We had no idea what it would be like to bombed, or to be dragged away from our parents, never to see them again. And of course, we had no idea what it might be like to be one of the children who were told to strip down for a shower, unaware that within a very short time the shower – not water – but deadly gas would end our lives.

We were into a game of touch football when my mother called us. She was crying and told us Pearl Harbor had just been bombed.

“Pearl Harbor? What was Pearl Harbor?” We could not envision the devastation that had engulfed that Naval port. We were anxious to get on with our game. It was different for the older folks who had witnessed war’s sorrow and distress just 24 years before. It wasn’t too long after that when a neighbor named Billy Kuhn, who enlisted in the Navy, was killed in action. That is when the sadness of war really began to sink in.

But within a few years we did get involved – as “Junior Air Raid Wardens.” It was exciting during mock air raids when we would don white helmets and hit the streets to make sure there were no lights to provide imaginary pilots with targets. We took it very seriously and felt well qualified. We had to undergo realistic training sessions as well as thorough Red Cross courses.

Then it all ended; first Germany, then Japan. The end was welcomed and we were older and much wiser than we were at the war’s onset.
However, the saddest part of it all was that within five years, we were right back into another war. And this time I ‘was’ old enough, a Marine, and as I listened to an announcement over our barracks PA system that we were at war with North Korea, I remembered my earlier innocent years and couldn’t help but wonder what the new generation of twelve and thirteen-year-olds thought about this war.

Questions/Comments? Contact Jim at james@jamesfalk.net, or visit www.jamesfalk.net.

James Falk, as a teen-ager, used to dream of being a big-time racketeer. Fortunately, his dream didn't come true. A 10th grade dropout, he finished highschool after four years in the Marines and went on to earn a B.A. in Journalism and an M.A. in Communications.