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| Gen. Douglas MacArthur & troops landing in the Philippines (National Archives) |
I might as well own up to my advanced age. I was born in 1939. For those who count on their fingers (I sometimes do) you’d need eight persons counting all of their fingers and one with a hand tied behind her back. That’d be 85.
Never thought it would happen to me. Or Ringo Starr, who just caught up to me. If you don’t know who Ringo Starr is, you’re either older than I (and that ain’t easy, friend) or way younger.
A few contemporaries of mine were chatting over a restaurant breakfast recently. Age came up. And let me put some of those 85 fingers into perspective. You are reading writings of a person whose parents — both mother and father — were born BEFORE MOTORIZED FLIGHT. Yup, before the Wright Brothers managed to get their original craft into the air at Kitty Hawk in 1903. And there weren’t many cars around then either.
Going back even further, my oldest grandparent, and the only one who ever laid eyes on me, was born in 1855 (I can prove it on his tombstone). So if you pay attention to history, there were a lot of people still around then whose lives overlapped with that of George Washington, who died in 1799.
That grandfather was 10 years old when Lincoln was assassinated in 1865 at the end of the Civil War. It was said he claimed he could see the glow of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 from his home in southern Ontario. I never got to ask him about that or anything else: he died when I was two years old, a week before the attack on Pearl Harbor, marking entry of the United States in to World War II.
There’s been a lot of war in my lifetime. My birth in October 1939 came a month after German Chancellor Adolf Hitler actually started WW II by invading and massacring Poland a month earlier.
Welcome to the world, young James (called at the time, Jimmy).
I actually remember some things about World War II as I grew into in my formative years — the first five years of my life. I remember a lot of talk about war and neighbor young men who had gone off to fight it. A couple of them who were members of our church were killed overseas. I remember the collective grief over that.
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| President Franklin D. Roosevelt signing the Declaration of War against Japan (National Archives) |
That “great” war was only the beginning of a succession of wars in the ensuing years as I was growing up. Five years after WW II came to an end, along came the Korean War. Wow, another war. I was 10 and still in elementary school. Exciting to a 10-year-old with sketchy memories of the earlier war. Not so exciting to the “kids” just a few years older in their later teens who were drafted into the military and sent over to fight it, many of whom never came back.
But hey, it only lasted three years. Surely that would be it with war. Yeah, right. Of course, there was fighting here and there in those intervening years until my own generation that, if called upon, could be drafted to fight. Every boy of my generation was required to register for the draft at age 18 and face induction into the army when your name came up. It was called your “military obligation.”
So I registered and managed to avoid being drafted until my early 20s with a college student deferment, but they finally caught up with me and down I went to Minneapolis for an army physical exam. I passed, in spite of being stone deaf in one ear since childhood. I should have had bone spurs.
Facing the draft, I joined the Minnesota Army National Guard where you could serve six months of active duty and six years as a weekend warrior back in your home state. I became a general…screw up.
While on active duty I recall sitting on bleachers with other inductees during boot camp and having a gruff sergeant lecture us for not trying hard enough in our training to become good soldiers. I’ll try to quote him. “You guys better start paying attention, ‘cause there’s a little country called Vietnam where things are heating up.”
Vietnam? Where’s that? It was 1963.
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| Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washinton D.C. (Wikipedia) |
When that one heated up and kept going for 10 more years, more than 55,000 Americans had given up their lives when it finally came to an end. I’ve stood at that long, black wall in Washington, D.C., with all their names carved in stone. Try that sometime; it’s hard to retain composure. Very hard.
Oops, I’m running out of space here, but not wars. Can’t recount every war in my lifetime but here we are in 2025 with war once again all around us — Russia vs. Ukraine, Israel vs. Hamas. Lots of people are dying still. Iran or Russia vs. United States? Always a question mark.
You hear quite a bit of talk these days about possible World War III. If it happens, I’ll probably miss it, but my grandchildren won’t. Concerns me deeply.
Happy summer. Enjoy. Better hurry, there’s not too much left.
Jim Heffernan is a former Duluth News Tribune news and opinion writer and continues as a columnist. He can be reached at jimheffernan@jimheffernan.org and maintains a blog at www.jimheffernan.org.
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