Many of us have family veterans we remember today. Adrastos remembers one here.

The memory of my father is here. Today is a look at how these brave people protected their family members from hearing about the worst of the war. Given what they went through, this was another sacrifice.

Living World War II veterans are becoming rarer and rarer. According to the Department of Veterans Affairs, it was just over 119,000 veterans left as of 2023, and I imagine that is getting closer to 110,000 now. Those that remain are at least in their 90s. It reminds me of World War I vets when I was growing up, the number of World War I vets participating in the parade and ceremonies grew smaller and smaller each year.

Along with my father, my family had other WWII vets. Several of my grandmother’s cousins served in the Navy. I had only met them a few times as they lived away from my hometown. She had several photos of them in sailor uniforms, all smiles. One of her cousins stuck in my mind because in his photos, he had a gold hoop earring. My grandmother said he came back with it and it was because he was in the Pacific and wanted to look like an old-fashioned sailor. An earring on a man was probably considered pretty odd in the mid-late 1940s, but the origins of Navy men wearing earrings go back to the tradition of sailors wearing gold hoops. The reason for these traditions range from superstitions that pierced ears improve eyesight t0 pierced ears being a preventative for seasickness to providing payment for burial in case their body washes up on some foreign shore.

Who knows what is true and what are just old stories, and that leads us to my grandmother’s happy Navy vet cousin. Grandma talked about her cousin’s war stories and those stories sounded less like tales of WWII in the Pacific, and more like tales of summer camp. He loved it, my grandmother said, and told her about how much fun he had.

I one time asked my grandmother if he saw combat and she said oh yes, he was involved in many big battles, the one she mentioned was Midway. And her cousin talked about them as they were lots of fun, very exciting.

This seems a little off, but based on what I had heard from a few other older relatives, her cousin was simply protecting my grandmother. These other relatives talked about how he had seen some horrible battles and survived them. It was certainly not fun.

My grandmother lived to be 91 and was one of the most sweetly naive people I’ve ever met. I can imagine that she would not have handled the reality of war very well.

Later, I would wonder if there were others like my grandmother’s cousin, and there seemed to be. I have a friend whose late great-uncle would talk about his time in the Marines like it was an adventure game, and this guy was in Guadalcanal, one of the ugliest campaigns of the entire war. My friend thought that his great-uncle didn’t want to bother family members with his trauma.

One of my older brother’s better friends is a Vietnam vet, and he told his parents that things were not so bad, until one day a month after his return to his childhood home he told them he had to move into his own place. The reason was they were right next to my elementary school, and he could not deal with seeing large numbers of children laughing and playing. He told his parents it was due to noise keeping him from sleeping for his third-shift civilian job, but he told his friends, including my brother, that it was because of what he had experienced and seen in Vietnam. Those experiences made the sounds of a large number of children on a playground too triggering for him. Hearing those sounds reminded him of the horrifying things he saw, and while he was never specific about why children triggered that in them, one can easily imagine why it would.

So, on this day, I remember the sacrifices these people made for our democracy, and I also remember how they protected their loved ones from the memories of those sacrifices.

The last word goes to Johnny Cash.