beat the devil

President Franklin Roosevelt declaring war on Japan




Thought of something, remembered something, and was told something, on Monday, while contemplating Memorial Day.  The "told" and the "thought of" -- discussed here, yesterday.


The thing I remembered was, that while he was living my dad didn't talk about World War II very much, especially not his personal experiences, but he did tell about a few things, & I remembered a couple -- one was, about two guys who got "kicked out" of the Army before they ever went to war.


The group of enlisted men my father was in, went to the Mojave Desert for training.








And one night, not long before they were going to go overseas, two of the men in the unit were rousted out of bed ("rousted."  Rousted?) -- out of bed and taken away.  They were sent home; they weren't allowed to fight in the war, or be in the Army, because they were "homosexuals."


(At the time when this occurred, in the early 1940s, they would have said "homosexual," not "gay" -- at that time the word "gay" meant happy, or very upbeat -- like, a gay party.  Or -- "we all had a very gay time" ...)


At the time when I heard my dad speak of this situation, it was long after WW II, and the word "gay" was just beginning to be heard of as a word for a different sexual preference.  (Maybe we first heard that usage of the word on the TV show "All in the Family"...)


And then the "lid" on the story was:  the other men didn't believe those two guys were homosexual; the group talked about it, and agreed that the two men probably had pretended to be that way, so they wouldn't have to go overseas to the war.


(Seriously who wants to get killed or maimed or captured??!  Nobody needs that s--t ... we could ask John McCain!  You would have to really really psyche yourself up, to go to war.  You would have to be brave, and feel afraid and be courageous anyway, and be very very very determined to prevail.  You would have to train and train and train, and tell yourself you're going to be


Tougher than the japs


and


Tougher than the krauts,


and WE are going to win, because we HAVE TO win.


In the film Casablanca, there's a scene in Rick's Café where a woman -- a Romanian refugee -- describes the war-time situation in her home country to Humphrey Bogart, saying, "The devil has the people by the throat!" ...


These terrible, terrible people, galvanizing their armies to do terrible, terrible things, really in the name of Ego and Hatred -- Mussolini, Hirohito, Hitler -- there wasn't any choice, somebody had to open up a can of whoop-ass on these people.)


Now, when I consider the story about the two men who were ejected from the military, it seems like -- two possibilities:


^^  Those two guys were not gay, and they came up with a plan to get out of the Army, and  my father and the other enlistees in the group were perspicacious and discerning, guessing the true motive.  Or --


^^  The two men were gay, and my dad and the other guys were, in a sense, naïve -- they couldn't believe those two guys would rather date each other, than a girl...


For young men out in the world for the first time, far from home, that would have been a startling and strange development.  Telling it, 25 - 30 years later, my father still sounded kind of startled.


Everybody went to that war.


My dad  (Pacific)
my Uncle Wally,
Uncle Grant,
Uncle Chuck,
(probably) Uncle Ed,
my friend Ted  (Pacific)
Richard Nixon  (Pacific)
George McGovern  (Europe)
Jack Kennedy  (Pacific)
Carl Reiner
David White, the actor who played Larry Tate on "Bewitched"



And -- going to war could mean you got killed or maimed, and it could also be the adventure of your life, in a sense.  When my dad spoke of the places he had been -- the Mojave Desert,



"the Punjab" in India -- the tone of his voice had a certain zest, and urgency, a faraway-ness -- the Punjab and the Mojave Desert -- exotic words, strange places...a long way from Akron, Ohio.


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