Gold Stars, War Memorials, and Memories

                                       


My father's plane was shot down over the Sea of Japan on a cold December day in 1951.  Later, Mom received a letter of condolence from President Truman. Daddy was dead; Mom was a Gold Star Wife. I don't remember much after that except that my heroic mother gave us a Christmas that was a happy one.


But years later, the Vietnam War that divided the country also divided our family, Mom usually stayed out of out our arguments.....until she didn't. "Tom was killed for line on a map," she said with a quiet ferocity that slammed a silence over us all. And she then slung her apron at a chair and left the kitchen.


I am reminded of these things as we again face the cost of undeclared wars. October 2017. Four Marine Green Berets are killed in Niger.

Since WW II, Congress has not made a declaration of war. The now-called Korean War started as a police action, became a conflict, and only after we stopped combat by declaring a stalemate was it labeled WAR.

My adult children and I visited the Mall in D. C. one Thanksgiving Day in the mid 1990s as I'd especially wanted to see the new memorial dedicated to those who died in my father's war. The Korean War Memorial is heart-achingly beautiful. Tall stainless steel helmeted solders, metal rain capes seemingly moving in a wind, steel boots slogging through juniper bushes. Even though I knew that the Korean War was primarily a ground war—if for no other reason than I'd seen every episode of M*A*S*H—my first impression was unsettling.  Knowledge is one thing. A child's impression is another. This did not represent my dad's war. I still saw it through my 1951 eyes, a scene with enemy soldiers firing machine guns at my daddy's plane. "How silly of me," I thought and moved on. I then went to show my family their grandfather's name on the computer listing KIAs.

But there was no mention of Lt. Commander  Benjamin Thomas Pugh. When I did find his name, I saw that he is listed as a "non battle related injury." I was stunned.  Injury? What!

"His plane was shot down in a bombing raid!" I said. Even now, that label affixed to my dad's name makes me angry.  So what if no North Korean soldier shot his body? They shot his plane, and it crashed down a frigid sea. He froze to death before he could be rescued. So......just as killed as anyone else. Just not KIA. Officially.

Wars hurt the families of those who die during these undeclared wars, KIA or due to "non battle related injury."   They suffer, and a small part of that family dies as well. Their absence leaves a ragged tear in the fabric of life that is not easily  mended.

Historians discuss the cost of wars (or conflicts, storms, operations, whatever) in terms of "blood and treasure." My dad and many others today die in not-wars. I loved that Navy pilot I'd known until I was almost eight. I love him still. He may have been a Lt. Commander in the U. S. Navy officially, but he was a dad with an all-over-the-face smile who read the Sunday funnies with me, who savored The Katzenjammer Kids strip and laughed aloud,  who ate ice cream in a vegetable bowl and let me share, who helped me plant snapdragons in the back yard.....of the Amameda house.


That Alameda house where officers in dress uniforms walked up to the front door and knocked.


That memory comes in slow motion. Mom walks toward the door. We three kids--Tomi (5), Ben (2), and I are in the living room. The Christmas tree is in one corner. Mom opens the door, then grabs the door frame as if she's falling, and she sobs. The officers proceed into our living room. Mom collapses into a chair and pulls her apron over her face. We kids don't know what is happening,  only that it's something terrible. One of the officers stoops down by Mom. He is talking, but I cannot hear him. My mother is crying.  The other officer guides us three kids into one of our bedrooms. It is he who tells us that Daddy has been killed. "Did it hurt him?" I ask.  He tells me that he froze to death. "It didn't hurt," he says, kindly. "He froze to death. It's like falling asleep." But even a child knows that freezing cold hurts.


My brother now has all of my father's ribbons and medals in a frame. The gold star is there, too. It's such a tiny thing to represent an entire life, to represent the blood and treasure of a man: a son, a brother, a husband, a father. He's buried on Cemetery Hill, now called Woodland Cemetery. His simple headstone overlooks the Ohio River and the small Kentucky town where he grew up, where I grew up. The river moves on, and I, as the child of a man who died of a non battle related injury, in an undeclared war with North Korea--a war not really over-- thinks of the wives and children of these recent victims of not-wars.