Of Grace and Time

World War II was from 1 September 1939 to 2 September 1945.

The Korean War was from 25 June 1950 to 27 July 1953. 

The Vietnam War was from 1 November 1955 to 30 April 1975.

My father was born October 22, 1924. My understanding is he went into the Army at age 17 and deployed to someplace in the Pacific during World War II. 

He was awarded a Bronze Star with a V for valor designation which means it was earned in combat. He rose rapidly in rank due to field commissions.

He was an E-6 after something like just two years, the war ended and he went home to the farm for six months. He then re-enlisted and started a much slower rise through the ranks a second time and was possibly an E-6 again when he met my mother in his thirties.

He deployed to Vietnam when I was a tot, probably in something like 1967. He spent about a month behind enemy lines and was medevaced out. He was awarded a Purple Heart.

I frequently describe him as a two-time decorated veteran. By that I mean he fought in the front lines of two wars, so he was a war veteran twice over, and was decorated both times.

He never deployed to Korea.

He had orders for Korea and his bags were packed. He was scheduled to fly out the next day when the phone call came informing him he was the only man in the Battalion -- that's about a thousand people -- with all the military schools they wanted for teaching College ROTC.

He was a high school drop out, which was quite common at that time, and ended up teaching college for a time under the kind of circumstances that inspire many people to feel like God personally interceded on their behalf.

He was "between marriages." And I'm trying to fit the puzzle pieces together from things I was told as a child by people with baggage who frequently glossed over details they didn't want to talk about.

In all the years I knew him, my father said exactly once that he and his first wife took turns divorcing each other. He said it to my brother during his divorce to be emotionally supportive.

My sister was born in 1958. So I'm inferring he had divorced his first wife for the second time and not yet gotten with his second wife.

While teaching college as a highschool drop out instead of fighting in the front lines of war and likely wondering how "a wretch like me" qualified for this moment of grace, he hunted his quota of squirrel every single weekend during squirrel season.

He wasn't married. He had no children. He never learned to cook. He had no use for that much meat. He gave it to some acquaintance who had six kids.

One of my sons -- the one surprisingly "like" Grandpa in a lot of ways in spite of looking nothing like him and having none of my father's gregariousness -- has no sense of time. I strongly suspect my father also had no sense of time.

When I was a little girl, he tried to make himself coffee once. He left the pot of water on the stove until it all boiled out and the aluminum coffee pot melted through the burner and my mother found it because she became concerned about what she was smelling while talking with me and my sister in a back bedroom.

Mom never let him try to cook again after that. He was barred from using anything fancier than the toaster.

In his teens, Dad made good money hunting foxes that farmers wanted gone because they were preying on the hen house and had put a bounty on the fox. In the military, he would pick some visual guide on the horizon to orient himself by and walk all night in silence, confident he was on track, something a lot of soldiers had trouble with.

He was good at things that made him a good soldier and a lot of those things are things that can qualify you for some label of disability of some sort if you are child these days.

I was always hyper aware of time until I nearly died and spent about four months bedridden at age thirty five. Afterwards, I sought advice from my "handicapped" child who had no sense of time for how to cope with a life permanently altered by a body too broken to function based on deadlines.

That son taught me to measure my progress by milestones instead of deadlines and I believe that is the kind of metric that made my father an excellent soldier. 

So dad would hunt squirrel and in the silence surrounded by nature in an environment where clocks were irrelevant, he likely thought his thoughts and felt whatever he felt without witnesses to judge him or tell him what it said about him or whatever.

Some people do therapy. Others hunt their quota every weekend and give away their kill to a needy family and make their peace with things both good and bad for which there's no real explanation and you somehow need to accept it anyway.