I’m reading John Kenney’s book, Truth in Advertising: A Novel. It’s a book on advertising and the manipulation of words, and an angry father, and how that affects his wife and children. I come to where the son is scattering his father’s ashes at his father’s request. His father wants them scattered where he learned WWII has ended. He was on a submarine out of Pearl Harbor when he learned the war was over.
The son thinks of how it was for those who fought as they look back from old age and post photos and memories on websites. “And so they share their history, their story, their moment in time.”
For example: “How is it I am eighty-seven years old? How will I be remembered? We fought in a war. We risked our lives for a cause. It mattered. We mattered. Didn’t we?”
Kenney goes on. “The United States submarine service sustained the highest mortality rate of all branches of the U.S. military during WWII. One out of every five U.S. submariners was killed in WWII.”
“Take a steel tube, put it three hundred feet underwater, take away its sight except for the most rudimentary sonar, send it out into a war. But before you do, fill it with teenagers and tell them not to be afraid.”
“Would you go to work if you had a twenty percent chance of dying?”
I think of my father who flew missions in a B-17, more than was required in WWII, until the plane was shot down, and he parachuted out, and turned over to the SS was incarcerated in a P.O.W. camp until the end of the war.
And now, we have a man who never served, sending people needlessly to die to save his skin from horrendous acts he committed. When will he and his puppeteers stopped? Surely now, our Congress will stop him from doing what he has no power or authority to do.
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