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Veterans' Day

Stories from my own family (all now deceased):

Dad (Albert D. "Bud" Hardy) enlisted in the US Army Air Corps in 1940. He was fresh out of St. David, AZ, a tiny town in southern AZ, and had lived in a one-room adobe shack with his grandparents -- no running water, no utilities, lit by lamp or candle, cooking on a wood fire outdoors. For him the Army was wonderful, hot food, nice barracks, etc. Even if he never got his wish -- the recruiting sergeant had sworn that he could get Dad sent wherever Dad wanted. None of which was true, of course. But Dad stopped complaining after December 7, since his pick had been Hickham Field, and he was an aircraft mechanic.

It did leave him with a lifelong terror of flying, tho. When I got married in DC, he drove the family from Tucson to DC rather than fly. He told me of being flown in transports by pilots who washed out of fighter school. The transports had their center wheel in the tail, most fighters had it in front, so the pilots would tip the plane forward to try to land on the nose wheel -- suddenly realize there was no nose wheel -- and tip the plane back hard.

Another time they were taking off, facing into a tree-covered mountain, heavily loaded. All he could see thru the windshield was trees, as he heard the pilot muttering "come on baby, you can make it baby, come on baby..." He said they seemed to clear the trees by inches.

Another time they arrived over a field at night, and it had low cloud cover. Neither they nor the field had radar, and if you tried to land in the cloud cover and it went down to the ground you'd crash. The pilot circled until he saw a gap in the clouds, then stood the plane on one wing and dived for it. They survived.

While in the Army, he had the first sit-in on a segregated bus (sorry, Rosa Parks, you had to hear someday). He sat down in the back, refused to move, said he enjoyed it there. The bus driver threatened him with arrest, Dad stayed where he was, and the bus driver gave in.

My uncle, George Ferguson, a/k/a Fergie or Bubbles, enlisted in the Coast Guard around the same time, figuring war was likely and the Coast Guard a safe assignment. Wrong, he wound up on a small boat with a depth charge launcher escorting convoys across the terrible North Atlantic. He talked of seeing clusters of sailors in the water in their life preservers, frozen to death in minutes after sinking. The ships were forbidden to pick them up; that'd make the ship a sitting duck, with a U boat within range.

After the war he was demobilized on the east coast, and had to get home via bus. Before WWII, he said, servicemen were poorly treated: they were presumed to be folks who couldn't hold down a regular job. In segregated Norfolk, VA, signs often read "Negros and Sailors Not Admitted." (I've read of other signs, reading "Sailors and Dogs Keep Off the Grass." When he was demobilized, tho, he travelled cross country and never paid for a single meal. Restaurant owners would refused to give him a tab, saying "it's on the house, sailor," or "you're money's not good here, sailor" with a grin. On the few times he got a tab, a civilian took it away from him and paid it. Dad reported similar events. In 1940 you were scum, in 1945 you were a heroic figure who'd helped save Western Civilization.

My late father-in-law (late father of my late wife), William Turner "Bill" Avery, served in the Army, mostly as a translator in Egypt, England and India. In the Army his buddy was Willie Jordan, who after the war introduced him to his sister, Frances, who'd lost her husband shortly after D-Day. Frances and he eventually married.

He had tales of India and Egypt. In India, at one point the toilets were metal pipes running into the ground with a concrete square around it. You squatted over it and when done flushed by pulling a chain to a shower head overhead. The monkeys, loved to swing down and pull the chain while the user was still squatting, drenching him as they and the other monkeys chattered in laughter.

One day an officer suggested that Bill, with doctorate and all, was a wonderful candidate for Officer Candidate School. Bill pointed out that at some point soon, we were going to be invading Europe, and we both know that the lifespan of a new junior officer during that invasion is going to be a lot less than the lifespan of a noncom translator in India!

Before the war, he had done postdoctoral work at the American Academy, in Rome. One day he walked past the last public rally that featured Hitler and Mussolini. He translated between a German who had driven all the way from Munich on his motorcycle just hear his fuhrer speak and an Italian gate guard who was saying he didn't care, you can't get in without a ticket. At another, he looked at a high Nazi official thru binoculars and was confronted by the Gestapo, telling him it wasn't allowed, binocs might conceal a gun barrel in one and a scope sight in the other.

After the war, he taught languages and founded the Univ. of Maryland Department of Classical Languages (which has since been merged, I believe). He told me of one diplomatic assembly to honor a Central American poet. When they brought out the cupcakes, he said a aloud a Spanish saying -- "For the dead there is the grave, but for the living there is cake." (Cake and grave rhyme in Spanish, and sweets are often presented at a Spanish funeral). The women blushed and the men laughed, and he asked a friend what did I say, and the friend replied, in this country "cake" is slang for a part of a woman that men like to eat."

He died in 1985, just before his grandson was born, and I told the minister about the incident, and he worked the saying into the end of the eulogy, with the note that it hadn't worked well the last time Bill used it. My wife, Frances, Jr., was weeping but looked at me with a smile and said "Daddy would have been so proud."