Yeah! The Man is holding me...

Wait. I got distracted.

I'm supposed to go to a play tonight. Mostly I just want to put on my pajamas and nap and then watch The Daily Show.

My Uncle Noel (my dad's brother) served in the Navy in the Pacific and saw action.

His ships was shot up badly and wasn't battle-worthy, and barely seaworthy. They limped back to San Diego and their commander was so gung ho he took the ship back out before it was completely repaired.

Half the crew went AWOL since they knew the ship wouldn't survive in battle, and indeed, it was sunk with all hands. My Uncle was one of the ones who went AWOL. Having uniform he bummed around by going from base to base. Finally an officer recognized him, told him to turn himself in because they'd go easy on him considering the circumstances. He did, spent six months in the brig during which time he learned how to be a radio operator. Then he was a radio operator in the Navy on submarines for the next 23 years.

My grandfather was drafted into the Seebees towards the end of the war. He was in his forties.

My dad tried to enlist in the Marines when he was sixteen, but they wouldn't take him. He joined the Air Force out of high school and worked as a medic and physical therapist in the hospital, treating vets coming back from Korea. My mom was a WAF and nurse's aid and met him there.

One of my uncles on my mom's side died during WWII. He fell off the back of a truck and cracked his head. Surprisingly a fairly large number of military fatalities are from just such stupid accidents.

Hec, do you know any of the details of your Uncle Noel? Like the ship name and/or type, what battles it was in, etc? I've never that story. (Although there were a lot of odd stories like that.)

One of my uncles on my mom's side died during WWII. He fell off the back of a truck and cracked his head. Surprisingly a fairly large number of military fatalities are from just such stupid accidents.

Yeah. My Sweet Crazy Ex,who was in the first Gulf War, talked about that a lot. The people dying stupidly in front of him seemed more distressing to him than the ones who were actually shot.

(Of course, he was wounded in an incident with someone trying to keep an enemy grenade as a souvenier so that may well be part of it.)

My dad's feet got him put into some odd category like 3B. They eventually took people in that classification, but by that time he was working for an industry "essential to the national defense" and the company wouldn't let him go. He was working at a packing plant that was putting out three grades of beef for the Army: A, B and C.

My mother's three brothers were all in the war in Europe. This comes up everytime we discuss my status as a non-ironer. "I ironed my brothers' uniforms during the war," she says. Her oldest brother, born and raised in Nashville, was put into the ski corps in Italy.

My ex-FIL, a nice man who still sends me a Christmas card every year, lost most of his face and most of his hearing at Anzio. He was in a hospital undergoing plastic surgery for about two years. By the time I met him, you could tell that the bottom half of his face was all scar tissue, but it wasn't glaringly noticable. I understand that was not the case for many years, which is why there are no photos of him at all. He ended up managing national cemetaries, a job reserved for disabled officers.

I had a work thing last night and so missed much of the WWII discussion. Probably a good thing, as having your mother shot at by German planes as she fled her home with a random neighbor who just happened to have a car, does not make for a very rational view of when the US should have gotten involved in the war.

My father spent much of the war playing basketball (he was semi-pro before the war) for the US Army in San Francisco (yeah San Francisco!), but then fought in Europe and dealt with the aftermath of concentration camps and reconstruction in Germany. He never talked about it.

In WWI, my grandfather (on my Mom's side) recruited African soldiers and was present for the whole battle of Verdun. The only thing that I know that resulted from that experience was that he became a lifelong Communist and forbid horsemeat to ever be eaten in the house.

My uncle a flew a bomber during WWII. He ended up with head injuries he died of a few years later. My Father was exempt from the draft as the only living male member of his family and sole support of his mom. My Grandfather was gassed during WWI, and had only half a lung left. He smoked like a chimney and died of respitory failure at 65. His last words to my mother were "maybe it is time I quit smoking". Under the circumstances living to 65 was fairly impressive.

So that you can say you know someone affected, my (not immediate) family was interned. We were in Hawaii, so it was much rarer there than in California where pretty much everyone was taken (thus, Hec's comment on the resulting lack of Japanese communities).

My grandfather was deemed a dumb farmer and thus not a threat, so my mom's family was not interned. But her cousin's family was. The father was educated in Japan and was (I believe) a schoolteacher, and thus dangerous.

My mother remembers, as a child, the truck that drove her cousins away. She didn't really process why, just that everyone was upset. Her cousin's family was one of the lucky ones, because they had help. My mother & her family moved into their house; otherwise they would have lost it. Everyone still lost many family heirlooms, because everyone had to destroy or hide anything that seemed Japanese. In fact, whatever didn't get hidden was taken by the government.

They were taken first to Tule Lake and then later to Topaz in Utah. They remained until the end of the war. Afterward, they were not the same people. They rejected much of their American heritage and became deeply involved in the mystic Japanese Dancing Goddess religion. They became withdrawn and would not speak of the internment.

Because of my grandparents' action, they were able to return to their home. However, it was not until recently that my mother was able to have a conversation with one of the cousins about their experience.

I was a child myself when I learned about it. I took it upon myself to give a presentation about it for speech class. I continued to try to inform people about what happened, because it was so unknown.

And it's important.

I thought that one of the reasons why there aren't any/few Japanese communities in California wasn't just that they didn't feel safe but that people took the opportunity of the internment to buy up their property and not everyone was able to get it back after the war.