Fate, Lies, and Memorials

By Michael Shay

My grandparents share a plot at Fort Logan National Cemetery in Denver’s southwest suburbs.

On Memorial Day 2003, my family and I, roses in hand, pay them a visit.

First Lieutenant Florence Green Shay was a U.S. Army nurse in a M.A.S.H.-style unit in France during World War I. She was in-country longer, and had more battle stars than, my grandfather, Second Lieutenant Raymond Arthur Shay. A cavalry officer, Grandpa trained on a horse with the Iowa National Guard, served a stint on the U.S.-Mexico border when Pancho Villa was the current terrorist scourge, then went "over there" (not allowed to say  “France” anymore) with a bunch of other Iowans.

Here is a wartime memory shared by Grandpa and retold 86 years later: On a train bound for the embarkation port, a young trooper was drunk and waving around a pistol. Grandpa received the order to disarm and arrest the man. It was the first (and last) time this former farmer and future insurance salesman had to act like a cop. Accompanied by two other armed troopers, he approached the man and ordered him to put down the gun. The man stared at him. Grandpa wondered if the drunken farm boy might shoot. Nothing happened for a few seconds. The train car grew very quiet. Grandpa then ordered him one more time to give up his weapon. The man sighed, and then turned over the gun. My grandfather then said "You’re under arrest." The young man burst into tears and was blubbering when escorted away. ""I’m not sure what happened to him," Grandpa remembered.

I never heard an actual war story from my grandmother. Raised in a middle-class Baltimore family, her favorite WWI stories were about the ocean voyage to Europe. A slew of handsome young officers. Surreptitious shipboard dates. "I kept a diary," Grandma said with a wink. "I’ll let you read it when you grow up." As a kid in the 1950s, I mainly knew Grandma as a bridge-playing Denver matron who loved the Baltimore Orioles. She dragged my brother and me to the ball games of the Triple-A Denver Bears. I wasn’t sure what to make of her unwarlike war stories. After her death in 1982, I read the diary. It was surprisingly chaste, her voice coy as a school girl’s. By that time a writer searching for family secrets, I was disappointed.

On Memorial Day 2003 at Fort Logan, I think about all of this. I relate some of the stories to my 10-year-old daughter Annie and my wife Chris. I note that Grandma’s inscription was on the side of the slab facing the grave. "You’ll notice she is one of the few women on this side of the marker," I say in my best teacher’s voice. "She’s also one of the few women WWI veterans in this cemetery."

Her death also preceded Grandpa’s by six years, so she was buried first. Still, there is no getting around the fact that she was a trailblazer, a debutante turned nurse turned war veteran by the time she was 26 years old. Back home in Baltimore in 1918, her sisters and friends were married and popping out the kids at a rate frightening to most Maryland Presbyterians.

Thousands visit Fort Logan on May 26. A line of cars back upon Sheridan Avenue, one of Denver’s nondescript suburban thoroughfares. I carry with me the secret code of my grandparents’ location. Section Q, plot 7252. When we lived in Denver, we visited Fort Logan each Memorial Day and Veteran’s Day. Now that we live 100 miles away in wind-blown Wyoming, we get here rarely. We would not be here today if it wasn’t for the fortuitous timing of hospital tests next day for Annie. It is the yearly check-up on her epilepsy, see if her untamed brain waves have settled down. We come down a day early and navigate construction and holiday traffic to get to this side of Denver before the cemetery closes its gates.

As we drive, NPR carries news of more American military deaths in Iraq. This will be an even sadder Memorial Day for the loved ones of these G.I.s. Eight soldiers based at Colorado’s Fort Carson have been killed in Iraq. At least three Wyomingites have joined the casualty lists. All are potential new residents of Fort Logan.

As the days pass, even non-peaceniks become curiouser and curiouser about the rationale for the current war. It appears that Bush and his cronies made up their own “Gulf of Tonkin” rationale that involved nonexistent weapons of mass destruction and phony terrorist links between Saddam and Osama, both still M.I.A. This continues a pattern of betrayal that has deep roots in American politics. It didn't begin with Bush, Rumsfeld, Rice, and Powell. Probably won't end with them, either.

My father enlisted in the U.S. Army at Fort Logan in 1942. That was back when it was still a military base. He was a WWII vet and a Cold War vet, serving until early 1946 with the occupation forces in Germany.

Fort Logan was also the site of the state mental hospital. My mother, a U.S. Navy-trained nurse, often said, on frantic days, that she was "ready for Fort Logan." Ironic, I think, that Fort Logan became the destination for both crackpots and corpses.

The wars roll trippingly off the tongue: Civil War, Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Gulf War I and II. Vets lie here from all the wars and others, those little skirmishes that livened up the Cold War years.

My father was eligible to be buried at Fort Logan. He elected to lie next to my mother in a Florida cemetery. He was buried in 2002; my mother in 1986.

I am not eligible to be interred here. I am not a veteran. I sometimes feel guilty about that. In 1969, I was selected as an alternate nomination to the U.S. Naval Academy. I chose Navy ROTC instead, attending the University of South Carolina on scholarship until 1971, when I was dismissed for conduct unbecoming a future officer. And bad grades, can’t forget those. The Navy commander who issued my marching orders told me that: 1. I was a hippie loser who would never amount to anything; 2. He had personally called my draft board in Daytona Beach, Florida, to notify it of my new draftable status.

As it turns out, I wasn’t drafted. My father, a Vietnam hawk, borrowed a semester’s worth of cash from his parents, my "Fort Logan" grandparents, to pay for my education until June. "You’re on your own then," he said. And not with a smile.

I worked. I kept my student deferral, which I received only through a fluke. The Selective Service had me registered as a student before I received a deferment for being in ROTC. It was my third draft card. It was important to keep the deferral since I had received a low draft lottery number and was draft bait without it. In August 1971, I was broke and depressed. I dropped out of college, returning to my parents’ house in Daytona. A month later my 1-A draft card came in the mail. I surfed. Found a job carrying bedpans at a local hospital. Waited for the inevitable, as there was no light at the end of the tunnel on the Southeast Asian front.

Finally, in January 1972, a month after I turned 21, I received a nice note from the Selective Service. It was my fifth draft classification. The U.S. Government no longer had designs on me and others that had lived long enough to turn 21. It was going to concentrate on those 18-20, people like my brother, some of my surfing buddies, guys that couldn’t go to college or didn’t want to go to college or were drop-outs like me, living at home with my parents and my eight brothers and sisters.

I had to ask this question: What do I do now?

I didn’t have an answer.

Ancient history. On bad days I wonder what my military career might have looked like. I was originally interested in a Navy career because I had the idea I could serve as a marine biologist and live in a place with good surf. A bit naive, I suppose, but it was at least a vision for the future.

When I imagined Vietnam, I saw nothing but nightly news reports of bandaged GIs and burning villages. I had no dreams of my own. I couldn’t even imagine me slogging through the rice paddies or staring blank-eyed into a network TV camera.

Back in the Vietnam War era, especially those years between the first draft lottery and the end of the draft in 1973, fate played ugly tricks. One guy’s draft board might be more lenient that another’s about granting conscientious objector status. Some boards moved with lightning speed; others were slow as molasses. Others were corrupt, letting some fortunate sons slip by while tapping others for the long trip to Saigon.

Some were drafted and fled the country; a brave few chose jail. Others got the call and went. Novelist Tim O’Brien was interviewed on National Public Radio on Memorial Day. A college grad, O’Brien was drafted. He went, not because of some sense of patriotism, but because he was ashamed not to go. He was afraid of what his family and friends and neighbors in his small Minnesota town would think. This threat paled to the one presented by the Viet Cong.

If called, I would have gone for that very reason.

But the call never came.

Each new war reconstructs the web of betrayal that ensnared all of us. Each new lie in 2003 takes me back to '64, '67, '72. Neocon pundits like to say that we "kicked the Vietnam Syndrome" during the first Gulf War, a.k.a. "The Year Saudi Arabia Leased Rented the U.S. Military."

Well, the Vietnam Syndrome lives on. If there is an antidote, it resides in a value that we teach our kids: telling the truth. We have heard precious little of that from the Bush administration.   

Here I am at this national cemetery on a May day in 2003, Chris, Annie, and I place roses on my grandparents’ graves. They served in another war with murky origins. An archduke was gunned down. Threats filled the air. Troops were mobilized on all sides and soon war had the energy it needed to begin. As far as I know, my grandparents never questioned their army service or the war’s rationale. They never wondered out loud how the sinking of a luxury liner could catapult millions of American farm boys and city girls into a bloodbath thousands of miles away.

It doesn’t change the fact that they served their country. I salute them for that. I thank them for intervening in my march to war. A few bucks for college in 1971, a few more months pass as the U.S. and Vietnam devour their young. The seasons turn, and here I am at 52, crazy at Fort Logan, adrift in a sea of white slabs.

Copyright 2003 Michael Shay