My Dad Did

John Hiatt--"Your Dad Did" (mp3)

We went to the National World War II museum when we were down in New Orleans over Christmas. It started out as the "D-Day" museum, but has since expanded, increasing its coverage of the Pacific Theater, as well as, in the most recent improvements, adding a 4-D film, and, in typical New Orleans fashion, a dance club and a "snack bar" restaurant designed by John Besh, one of the hottest, most highly-regarded chefs in the country (and a New Orleanean as well).

We didn't do any of that.

Because my father was with us and because of a lack of time, we only went to the section that focused on the war with Japan.

It is estimated that 16.1 million men and women served the war effort during World War II. About 5.5 million of those vets are still alive. My father is one of them.

He doesn't make a big deal about having served on several South Pacific islands from 1944 to 1946, maintaining and repairing airplanes. We're not even sure we buy it, since most of the things he's tried to repair over the years have been miserable failures, including an infamous toaster. He has not been able to put them back together.

You find out he's a vet in odd ways. At the last Mocs home football game, which came during the week of Veteran's Day, the four branches of the armed services presented their colors and played their anthems, and he stood alone among the crowd, as he had always been taught to do, at various points during those ceremonies. I guess other vets did, too. I was watching him.

At the museum (which, by the way, is state of the art, both in terms of its offerings and in terms of the balance of perspectives it provides), there was a large map which showed every single country and island that had been part of the war in the Pacific. I had not seen a map with such detail before; in fact, most maps don't show a lot of those islands. You realize not only that there's more in the Pacific than you thought, but you also get a sense, despite the vast expanses of ocean, of how relatively close various key historical location are to each other--Midway to Hawaii, several battles to Australia, for example. The map allowed my father to point out every island he had visited, some that I had never heard of, some that he had never mentioned before. I could tell how proud he was to be able to show his two sons and one of his granddaughters the full extent of his service.

We went through that whole area of the museum fairly slowly, reading a blurb here, watching a mini-movie there. At one point, there was a very large photograph of the airfield at Guam, and I asked if he could orient the places in the photograph, but, though he pretended that he could, I could tell that he was a bit lost, and so I'd show him various buildings and suggest what they might have been and he would agree.

If you are a World War II vet, when you get your tickets and prepare to enter the museum, they have you sit at a desk and ask you to fill out a form to document where you served and with what company, etc. Then they give you a placard to wear all over the museum that clearly identifies you as a veteran of the Second World War.

As a result, everywhere you go in the museum, you run into people who want to shake your hand and thank you for your service. I suppose it's the kind of thing that might seem kind of cheesy, but I guarantee you, when it's your father, it doesn't seem cheesy at all.

The other thing that happened at the museum was that I finally saw my father's true age. Most of the time I spend with him each week, we sit at a table at Panera or some other restaurant or he is at my house and among my family or friends. Even though he is nearly 84, he barely seems to have lost a step or any sharpness to his mind. At the museum, amidst a fair number of people, he was a bit disoriented, seemed more frail, moved with less confidence. It is, after all, almost 64 years since he took his post-war flight from Guam to Kwajalein to Pearl Harbor to San Francisco to Pittsburgh.

One of many interesting things about my father is that even as he has become increasingly conservative, there is one of his positions that has never changed: he has never had anything less than contempt for war and the men who run it and the folly of its purposes and the careless ways that it wastes human life.

During the Vietnam War, especially as my brother and I got closer and closer to draftable age, he would always say that there was no way that he was ever going to let us go. Fortunately, it didn't come to that, so I don't really know what steps he would have taken. Move to Canada perhaps. Certainly, there are plenty of vets who celebrate their war years and glory in the praise of being part of "the Greatest Generation" and what they accomplished. My dad learned a different lesson from his time of service during World War II.

Hiatt Comes Alive At Budokan is available at Itunes.