This week this post is not about the lottery.
It is about Dad, Uncle Stephen, WW 2 and Stories
Last week was the 75th Anniversary of the ending of World War 2. Through all the commentaries, stories and reflections, two men were in my mind – my dad, Ernest J. Merino, Jr. and my mom’s youngest brother, Stephen W. Minor. Two men who were central to how I judge what is a man, and two men I took totally for granted. Two men who lived to tell of their stories of the war. Two men who told so little.
I grew up during the ‘50s and ‘60s in Imperial Beach, Ca., a small city at the southern foot of San Diego Bay. Every man I knew was either on active duty or was a vet. I didn’t know there were any other kind of men. Men served. It was a rule of the world. Military service was no big deal. All the men had stories. Most of the stories would have put to shame the script to any sitcom.
My dad joined the US Navy in the summer of 1941. He was eighteen-years old, born and raised in New Orleans. Neither of his parents were US citizens. His father, Ernesto Jose Merino, was a Mexican national who spent his entire adult life in this country and loved everything about the USA. His mother was stripped of her US citizenship when she married a foreign national. (That stupid law was later rescinded.) None of that mattered. He volunteered. He served.
My uncle was drafted into the US Army in 1943. He was the youngest of three sons and the last one at home. He could have sought an exemption. He did no such thing. He served.
My dad was stationed at Pensacola that fateful Sunday morning. He ended up in the Western Pacific as crew chief on a bomber. As he said, he was in it from Day One to Day Last. And to hear him tell it, he served in McHale’s Navy; nothing bad ever happened. He was never in danger and everything was funny. His story of eating ice cream during a Japanese attack on his base always made his daughters laugh.
I’m pretty sure he was lying though his teeth. Flying on a bomber while people are doing their best to shoot you down is not funny. It must be terrifying. He did it over and over and over.
My uncle served in Europe – a few yards of Europe. I only heard him speak twice about his hitch in the army. He shared that one night on guard duty in England he came around the corner of a building and found Gen. Eisenhower on his knees. As he said, “He wasn’t digging for fishing worms. He was praying.”
And one afternoon when he had had one too many beers, he shared he had trained for weeks and weeks to fight for sixty seconds. “If I had run one second faster, I would have been ok. If I had run one second slower, I would have been dead.” What he didn’t share, no matter how many beers he had had, before he was evacuated he lay on Omaha Beach for twenty-four hours, his leg torn up by machine gun fire. He kept himself conscious by burning his arm with his cigarette. He never mentioned what is was like to lay there on the open beach unable to move, while people up on the cliffs were doing their best to shoot him dead.
Peace was declared and both men made it home. My dad was twenty-three. My uncle was twenty-two. They were already old men. Both men worked steady and hard. Both men raised families. These guys just did what they had to do and got on with it. That’s how it was for the rest of their lives. That’s what men did. Funny stories or no stories, to my sisters and my cousins these men were just dads doing dad things. Whether either man found peace I could not say.
My dad died in 1967, an old forty-four. We kids never had a clue. Daddy told his funny stories and his daughters laughed. I hope our laughter brought solace.