There are sociologists who try an tell us different, but the facts are the facts. Males and females differ in ways other than just the physical. This may enrage some folks, but males see the world one way and females see it in another way. I could devote a series of blogs to my own personal observations over the last four decades, but then I would have everyone angry at me. However, when sociologists try to dim the line of difference between male and female, they are merely denying truth. Give a little boy a stick and he has an imaginary sword or an imaginary gun, give a little girl almost anything she can hold in her arms and she has an imaginary baby. You can say that it is a result of violence in our society or the preconceived notions within families, but is really just the way we are wired.

          Which brings us to a hot summer night in a neighborhood of Indianapolis in 1966. Our whole family was in Indianapolis to visit with some of my mother’s family. She had two sisters who lived there, Nina and Edith, and their husbands, Omar and Lonnie. My mother’s mother lived on Omar and Nina’s property in a mobile home, which she shared with her sister, Kitt. Also, my grandmother had raised three of her granddaughters, one of which, Carol, still lived with at home with Granny and our great aunt Kitt. Nina had three boys, Omar, Jr, Philip and Ronnie. Omar and Phil were grown and Ronnie, though just a teenager, was off serving Uncle Sam. Edith had two sons, Rick and Steve and then there were my two sisters, Cathy and Debbie, and me. Carol was a year or so older than Cathy, so they hung out, Debbie and Rick were just a few months apart, so they hung out, and Steve and I were also just a few months apart, so we hung out. For the first five days or so of our visits, it was always fun. Lots of different things to do, none of which involved a tractor, and places to go. It was different. But after five days it always started to get old. I always started to get anxious to get home.

          It was our last night there. That night we had gone and watched the fireworks, it being the Fourth of July. It was actually the first fireworks I had ever seen. I was ten and we certainly had displays in Ohio, but we never went. My mother always explained that they bothered my father because of the war. That didn’t make sense to me. He had been Navy. In my mind that meant he floated around on a boat the whole war, probably fishing over the side. He would watch war movies on TV, but never Navy movies. My only knowledge of World War II at that time was the war on the ground and in the air. He had told me once he had been in the CBs, but had not explained what that meant. That was all I ever got.

          As a point of information, CB stands for Construction Battalion. The way they spelled it was Sea Bees, which kind of made it cutesy. But there was nothing cute about it during WWII. When the Marines landed on some beach on some jungle island thousands and thousands of miles from home, they were usually met with fanatical defenders who would rather die than give up a foot of ground. The next wave after the Marines usually included the CBs to make fortifications and then airfields and the like. They would drive their equipment off the landing craft under fire and they would often be firing their weapons in return. I now know a lot about the CBs and I understand a lot about my father’s psychological problems he had later in life. Fresh off the farm, fearful of being killed and having to kill other men. Sometimes he would wake up during the night screaming. Until I was around 8 or so my mother would sometimes pull little pieces of metal out of his leg. I never understood.

          Anyway, back to that muggy July 4^th of 1966. I was tired of my cousins. Nothing against them, just wanted to be home. Of course, I was tired of my sisters, but that was pretty standard. All the kids were in the basement of Omar and Nina’s home, so I wandered up to the main part of the house. My mother and her sisters and my grandmother and her sister, Kitt, were at the table talking women things. One aunt said, “Where are the men?” My mother replied, “Oh, they’re out back sitting around and smoking and probably talking about how terrible it is to be married to us.” They all laughed but I stopped dead still there on the steps. Oh, now, that would be fun! Get the dirt on my mother and aunts! I wanted to hear that! So, I went the rest of the ways up the steps and slipped out the side door. Sure enough, in the darkness I could see the ends of three glowing cigarettes and I could hear the low murmur of men’s voices. It was getting close to midnight and I knew that if I walked up my father would send me back in and tell me to go to bed, so I took a circular route. When I got well behind them, I dropped onto the ground and bellied crawled to where I could hear my father and uncles.

          I had been next to my father during the fireworks. He had jumped at the explosions, sometimes moaning deep in his throat. I hadn’t understood that, but I also noticed that Omar and Lonnie were not enjoying their selves, either. In fact, all three men had looked like they wanted to bolt. It just didn’t make sense to me at that moment. But once I started to listen, I realized they were not talking about their wives. I was listening to three warriors talking about the darkest time in their lives.

          These were three Kentucky boys who grew up in the same area. Farm boys. Maybe a couple of fist fights growing up, but certainly not killers. War changed that. My father was a Sea Bee. He lost his best friend to a mortar round. It was that round that blew metal into his leg that took years to work out. It also blew bone and other fragments of his friend into his leg. Omar had landed on the Normandy beaches two days after D-Day. Bloated bodies were still floating in the surf and had to be pushed aside as they came in. Then they fought their way to Berlin. Lonnie was a tank commander in Korea. My father and Omar both made crude little jokes about guys who fought in tanks, but they were gentle jokes. Lonnie told about the retreat from North Korea after their invasion failed and the tank running out of fuel and having to be abandoned. He and his crew had to walk with the foot soldiers in that brutal winter. There were no more jokes.

          I listened for another half hour, then the men got up and headed into the house. The little gathering was breaking up. I sat in one of the chairs. War had always been like an adventure to me. An exciting adventure. As I sat there now, though, I had a feeling of confusion. Were all those guys I had watched in movies and read about as scared as my father and uncles? Had they all wished to be home again? Had all those heroes really just been regular guys? And then the thought came. Were my father and uncle’s heroes?

          They are gone now. Lonnie died fairly young from a heart attack. Edith never remarried. My father and Omar died at about the same time as each other, though Omar passed first. Age had taken its toll on both of them. The America they had fought for was a different place when the three died. None of them were happy about it. But they raised their families. My father and Omar got to see the century turn. Life had good moments and bad moments.

          Looking back, I now think of them all as heroes. Certainly, much greater heroes than the guys who did heroic things on screen or in the pages of books. Three men who answered the call to arms of their country. Three men who left their mommas behind and went to war. Three men who came home irrevocably changed. Just regular guys. Guys who never wanted to talk about it except with other men who had ‘been there.’ They would have laughed at being called heroes. But they were. And so are all of you men and women who are reading this who put on that ill fitting uniform. Whether it was war time or peace, you were ready. You were scared, you were thinking of home, you were not happy. But were ready. Thank you for your service. We remember your greatness.