Veterans I Know and Have Known

So much heard lately about the really rotten treatment many veterans receive in our country.  Made me think about all the veterans I know.
The first veteran I ever knew was my Pop.  He was in the infantry in WWII.  He spent two years slogging around the Pacific.  He never wanted to talk about it much.  He admitted to me once that he had to kill a man with a knife once.  It bothered him a lot.  Never mind that this was war, and the guy he killed had already killed a lot of our guys.  Taking a life that way takes something out of you, wounds you.  It certainly stayed with Pop, though it didn't surface often.  He only told me about it one evening shortly before my wedding, when he was talking to me about what it meant to be married to a military man.  He wanted me to understand that there might be things Matt would never feel able to share with me.
Even so, Pop was proud of his service, and he did enjoy a few benefits of being a veteran.  He got a low interest mortgage, and the house I spent the first part of my life in was built with that money. We had to move when I was 14.  The neighborhood was no longer a safe place.  (Compton, CA.  Need I say more?)
Other vets I have known include a neighbor we met when we first moved here.  Don was a B-17 pilot in WWII.  He said he landed more than one time in an aircraft that shouldn't have still been flying.  He later became an officer in the Air Force and after retiring from the Air Force, he worked as a mail carrier for many years.  He was a good neighbor, and I was very proud to know someone who was able to bring all of his crews home in more or less one piece.  That Air War in Europe was very costly to us in terms of bomber crews.  He died several years ago, and I still miss him.  He used to come in the library all the time and take the free computer courses we offer.  He was so proud of me for getting a job there.  He was one of my references.

Many of my coworkers are veterans.  Julie, she who is our branch's corporate memory, (I call her Julie All-Knowing and All-Wise)  was in both the Air Force and the Navy.  She is the wife of a retired Navy man.  (So in her, I get to claim two vets that I know, herself and Ralph.)  Julie is very conscientious about her job, she is a loyal friend, and one of the funniest people I know.  She and Anne and I can not be in the same room for very long without very noisy hilarity erupting. (Even as old as we all are these days!)

  Anne, who now works at another branch, is a retired Major.  She was in the Air Force at a time when there were few women in the service, and very few female officers.  She was on a high-security air crew as a communications officer, and often had challenges when they had to get quarters on some bases.  There just weren't any visiting officer's quarters or crew rest facilities for females.  She has many interesting stories about her service.  She is a uniquely dedicated and persistent worker.  If Anne is on the job, it will be done, done right, and in a timely manner.  Some think she is a little brusk, but her laugh is often in evidence, her sense of humor one of the better ones I have known.  She came to sit with me in the hospital when Matt had his surgery.  She made me get up and walk around, made me drink something so I wouldn't dehydrate, and stayed much longer than anyone but our good friend Michael.

There is another coworker I must write about.  He works at the Library Service Center, and I mainly work with him through phone calls, notes, or email, as we both work on Inter-Library Loan  materials.  He is a Marine.  He retired as a Gunnery Sergeant.  After he retired, he worked as a corrections officer, and then he came to work for the library system.  Roger is grumbly and gruff, Mr. Tough Marine at first glance, but soon you see the warmth and the humor.   He is a stalwart presence among us, and we are proud to know him.  Another Old Marine I knew, Father Stan Donham, when I asked him to pray for Roger when Roger had surgery, said, "Oh, Gunnery Sergeants aren't born or made.  They are issued directly from the Quartermaster."  Of course he prayed for Roger, Marines stick together.  Father Stan lost his own fight with cancer while Matt was still in the hospital after his surgery. We were unable to go to the funeral.  Father Stan was a fighting Marine who served on Okinawa in WWII.  Father Stan was also the first among the clergy at St. Paul's that we met.  He welcomed us, and spoke with us, and introduced us to people, and we ended up in  the choir and helping with any number of other things.

I have an email friend who is a vet.  She was in the same career field as Matt when she retired.  She stayed in longer, got more rank, but also had to go remote to Korea for a year, and then got sent to Afghanistan.  She retired after she got back stateside.  She suffered an injury over there, and it did lots of damage.  Roxie is tough, though, the fighter pilots she used to work with called her "The Hammer", so you know she's not a marshmallow.  Roxie has gone back to school, gotten her degree, and is now working to help other vets.  She has faced cancer, and won.  She is a tough cookie.  She is also amazingly dedicated and caring in her work with her fellow vets.  She told a story today on Face book about an elderly gentleman who came in to get eyeglasses.  She called his name, using his rank of "Chief", and he didn't realize she was calling him.  He told her no one had called him "Chief" in more than 3o years.  She said that was wrong and a shame, because he worked hard to earn that rank, and that title, and he was entitled to be addressed by it.  He is 86 years old.  From the way she told that story, I don't know who made whose day.  Maybe Roxie made the Chief's day, but just maybe he made hers.  Respect.  It costs so little, but it is worth so much.

I have a cousin who is retired Air Force, my late Uncle Mickey was a retired Navy man, Uncle Wallace was retired from the Army,(he served in Viet Nam) , and my husband's nephew David is a veteran of three tours in Iraq and has a bum leg because he was injured over there.  He is out of the Army now, and was going to school.  We haven't heard a lot from him lately, so I hope he is OK.  He is married and has two little ones.  He was two the year Matt and I got married.  David used to escape from his kindergarten class when I was subbing at the school he went to and come find me when I was out on yard duty.  He doesn't remember doing that, but he sure did.  Secretly tickled me that he would do that just to see Aunt Katie.  I always took him back, and the teacher never seemed to get after him too bad for it.  She knew where he went, after all. I told him he shouldn't come out without asking first, though.
His mother, Matt's sister Carol is also a vet.  She was in the Air Force for awhile before Matt enlisted.  She got out when she was expecting her oldest. (In those days, they'd give you a discharge for being pregnant.  No more.  )

Of course, the vet I know best is my husband.  He served 20 years in the Air Force, most of them as an aircraft loadmaster.  He flew on C-130s and C-141s. He was deployed in 1990 for Desert Shield and stayed through the end of Desert Storm.  He ended his career as an Operations Resource Management Specialist.  He was the NCOIC of the Operations Resource Center for the 966th AWACS Training Squadron when he retired in 1998.  He served with great dedication, really enjoying his job and the many experiences it gave him.  He traveled all over the world, got to see all sorts of amazing things, got to drop some interesting things out of his airplane, and won recognition for the outstanding way he performed his job.  (He has lots of "confetti" on his dress blues.  Never mind that he hasn't had to wear them for about 15 years now.)


I know a number of our library customers are veterans.  A lot of the people who live in this area are.  Tinker is a large base with a nice commissary and a nice Exchange, and a very nice new clinic.  The community is very supportive of the base, it is the largest single location employer in the state.  Many military retirees live here, because the cost of living is pretty low, the quality of life is pretty good, and there is such a nice base here.  The retirees are also an excellent resource for the military because many of them volunteer on base and fill jobs that are needed but not funded.  They work in Morale and Recreation activities, they work in the pharmacy and clinic, all over really.  We are family.  If you are military, you are one of us.  We will care for you, stand by you, because we've worn those boots ourselves, or stood those lonely vigils waiting for a loved one to come back from a deployment.

My own life is made richer by the presence of so many veterans in it.  I bet if you think about it for awhile, you will find that you know a number of veterans yourself.  We owe these men and women our respect for the job they were willing to do so that we would have the life we enjoy now.  I am so proud of my father, my uncles, my cousin, my friends and my husband for difficult things they have done with grace and with valor.  I am, I must admit, a bit proud of myself for staying alone when Matt was away, even in a pretty bad neighborhood in San Bernardino, and for seven months in a foreign country.  My parents couldn't believe it, I've always been such a chicken, but if Matt could go off  and face unknown dangers (many missions were those that we were never sure if it was real or an exercise), then I could keep the home front running smoothly until he got back.
I pray our Congress would remember what we owe the men and women who were willing to give so much of their lives to the service of this country.  They have faced dangers most of us cannot imagine.  They deserve to have decent benefits for their service, and those who stay in long enough to retire should have more security than they do now.  Pensions are small, and the kids today will get even less if they stay in for a whole career, and we pay premiums for our medical benefits.  (Admittedly, they are a LOT less than anybody else would have to pay, but there was at one time the promise of free medical care for retirees.  That went away even before Matt retired.)  Vets and military retirees should not have to fear the loss of the benefits that they quite literally fought for.  That so many are without basic necessities  is shameful.