We sure make a good show of remembering our history. So why do we seem perpetually doomed to repeat it?
By Bryan A. Hollerbach
Photograph by Jennifer Hengst
More than half a century afterward, my father sometimes still weeps.
That revelation from my mother has driven me here, to this manicured North Side hillock ringed with Ohio buckeye saplings and a riot of petunias. Five flags—one for each branch of the U.S. military—snap in a breeze caressing the hillock, their lines clinking against their poles, and vehicles whoosh along Airport Road nearby. Above everything, to the north, towers the triple-toothed sprocket of Building 100 of the Boeing Company, which counts my father as a retiree.
Technically, though, he never worked for Boeing. In 1990, after four decades as a field-and-service mechanic, he retired from the local corporate giant that Boeing absorbed in 1997, McDonnell Douglas. Those four decades passed nonconsecutively, moreover. My father joined what was then named the McDonnell Aircraft Corporation in 1949, just a year before something simultaneously mundane and momentous occurred: A telephone rang in Independence, Mo.
“It was the Secretary of State calling from his home in Maryland,” wrote Harry S. Truman in his memoirs. “‘Mr. President,’ said Dean Acheson, ‘I have very serious news. The North Koreans have invaded South Korea.’” The United Nations “police action” that focused on the two Koreas subsequently involved the United States and 18 other countries, and the 5.7 million Americans who served in the armed forces in that conflict ultimately included the younger son of a Berkeley widow who had immigrated here from Germany with her husband after World War I.
I find that younger son’s name on a plaque riveted to the outside of the Boeing St. Louis Veterans Memorial, 6 feet to the right of the flagpole flying the U.S. Navy’s banner. Beneath the Department of the Army seal—the motto “This We’ll Defend” and the date 1775—appears:
Alfred J
Hollerbach
The plaque, cast as an outsize dog tag, measures 3.75 by 2.25 inches, large enough to cover the average human palm—as well as the average human life.
Like most years, 1951 included a number of memorable events: J.D. Salinger and Marshall McLuhan both published their first books. Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn starred in The African Queen. I Love Lucy debuted on CBS.
And on November 20 of that year, my father was drafted.
His basic training lasted 6 months, 15 days; his active service, 1 year, 11 months, 27 days. His time overseas, mainly with the 306th Engineer Dump Truck Company, totaled 1 year, 5 months, 24 days.
Those numbers function as numbers often do, seemingly quantifying the unquantifiable. From a similar vantage, I view the two-year-old Boeing memorial. It forms a great circle, its circumference divided into fifths, and the arc of each division measures 27.5 feet. Atop foot-high decorative concrete walls, the divisions themselves measure 6 feet in height. Each side of each division contains 52 columns of plaques similar to my father’s, in eight or nine alternating rows that form a gigantic checkered band; two or three rows of expansion slots also line each side at the top and the bottom. The divisions, which are almost a foot thick, bong beneath a knuckle—hollow. Their brushed stainless-steel surfaces, behind the 4,400-odd plaques, reflect everything blurrily, turning the world spectral.
When the transport General R.L. Howze delivered him and 25 other St. Louis–area servicemen Stateside once more in November 1953, my father would have foreseen no such memorial, in all likelihood. In those days, America didn’t wallow in symbolism. After returning to my grandmother’s Carson Road cottage, in any event, he passed six years in the U.S. Army Reserve before earning an honorable discharge and reassembling the scattered puzzle pieces of his civilian life.
On his reservist I.D. card, my father looks unutterably young. In the best of all possible worlds, that I.D. never would have existed because geopolitics never would have shanghaied him for more than two years. As long as aggressors exist, however, America will apparently always require warriors.
In that respect, the degree to which Veterans Day goes underrecognized saddens and puzzles me. Has the bellicosity of the moment so habituated us to war? Has this new millennium’s martial start transformed each of us into a veteran and every day into Veterans Day—thus rendering the holiday everyday, dismissible?
If so, we have savaged a nuance of history. Veterans Day, at base, marks the 1918 armistice enacted at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month during World War I, “the war to end all wars,” half a year before the Treaty of Versailles. “On that day let us solemnly remember the sacrifices of all those who fought so valiantly, on the seas, in the air and on foreign shores, to preserve our heritage of freedom,” President Dwight D. Eisenhower proclaimed when Armistice Day became Veterans Day in 1954, “and let us reconsecrate ourselves to the task of promoting an enduring peace so that their efforts shall not have been in vain.”
My father’s tears suggest the degree to which that reconsecration has failed. A big, bluff 77-year-old who chops firewood for recreation, he speaks little of Korea. When the topic does arise, despite a letter of commendation and other decorations included in his wartime effects, he lays claim to an undistinguished tour of duty—just another G.I. among this nation’s 3 million living veterans of the Korean War and
24 million total living veterans.
My father neither piloted an F-86 Sabre through MiG Alley nor stood at Douglas MacArthur’s side when Truman cashiered the general. Then again, neither did he number among the 33,741 U.S. combatants slain in Korea.
Now, I have no idea what might make my father weep periodically, during stray TV newscasts viewed from the sanctuary of his La-Z-Boy; neither have I any wish to pry into his abiding grief. Even in an era defined by planned obsolescence, pain recognizes no expiration date, and the present shares a discomforting number of resonances with the past of the Korean conflict. Pundits periodically liken the Truman and Bush administrations, for instance; the mad machinations of Kim Jong Il continue to make North Korea a potential powder keg; and this nation remains riven by ideological witch hunts worthy of Wisconsin Senator Joseph R. McCarthy. Also, of course, the Middle East still burns and bleeds. (In the year of my father’s conscription, both the prime minister of Iran and the king of Jordan were assassinated.) In that light, tears seem an all too reasonable response when Iraqi IEDs continue to fill American “human remains pouches”—read: body bags—and flag-draped transfer cases continue to be airlifted once more to these shores.
At the entrance to the Boeing memorial, I pause as an airliner roars heavenward from Lambert. Its trajectory tops the flag flapping above me. At the lower right of that flag’s U.S. Marine Corps seal, a hole gapes. Something has torn its fabric, and the flag has gone unmended.
I trudge back to my car, shadowed by the fear that we may waste the rest of our days praying for an 11th hour that never comes.
