In a late morning ceremony Cadet Delahanty and a dozen classmates swore freely and solemnly to defend and uphold the Constitution of the United States and have been commissioned as second lieutenants in the United States Army. It was an occasion of great pride for these new junior officers, splendid in their tailored blue uniforms, for their families and friends, and for the cadre members past and present who had brought them to this point. (It was also lucrative for several battalion NCOs whose pockets were jingling with antique silver dollars by the end of the first salute ritual.)
The keynote speaker gave a moving speech, stirring in parts and humorously self-deprecating at other times, exhorting the new officers to take care of their soldiers. Over the last few weeks similar words have no doubt been uttered in a hundred or more auditoriums across the country. The speaker discussed history and tradition and asked the veterans in the room to stand and be recognized.
He then asked for those veterans who had served in World War 2 to raise their hands. The speaker and his audience scanned the room. Sadly, the inexorable grinding of time has culled nearly all the enemy could not; a single stooping old man lifted his hand no higher than his face. This was my wife's father.
He had traveled eight hundred miles to make the ceremony, not an easy trip for a fellow pushing 90. But my wife's family has something of a military tradition, and he was there to see it carried on. His own father had been transformed from plowboy to doughboy in 1917, serving with the AEF in the Great War. He survived being gassed by the Germans though his lungs were never the same. Oddly, though, according to my father-in-law, the Germans he met were actually decent fellows: it was the British officers his father couldn't abide. After the ceremony men much older than I came up to shake his hand and speak with him. If there had been a cash bar and if he were still drinking, he wouldn't have left thirsty.
The commissioning had an unusual significance for me as well. Joining ROTC had been solely my son's idea. Proud though we were now, we had neither encouraged nor discouraged his ambition. I offered some helpful comments on his essay, but after helping straighten out a scholarship initially offered to the wrong school, my main function in the years that followed was getting him to the airport on time. He set a goal of being assigned to active duty in the branch of his choice and achieved his goal. The academic and ROTC honors he received along the way were purely incidental to him.
Like my father-in-law, my father, gone 20 years, also served in World War 2. He had been honorably discharged but early on rebuffed my questions about the war, so I never followed up. I only knew there had been a bitter fight with his immigrant parents, whose permission he needed as a 17 year old. As an adolescent I did have a tangible connection to his experience, and it was not a pleasant one. In a box in our attic I found a set of samurai swords he had brought home from the Korean occupation. I unsheathed the longer one, the katana. Marveling at the fine steel instrument, out of its scabbard for the first time in 15 years, I gently ran a finger along the blade and realized it was streaming blood.
Anyway, just a few months ago in thinking about family history I recalled that my father had once briefly attended college in upstate New York. I always assumed he had left to get married but until now I never cared to know the timing. When my mother, then his girlfriend and later the first of his three ex-wives, responded that he had gone to college before the war, I was able to work out the details. His parents had relented but on condition that after graduating high school in the spring of 1944, he would go to college, which meant joining ROTC at Syracuse. This bright, impulsive and immature 17 year old lasted a few months before he was expelled from the program, reverting to enlisted status. He completed training in time to be shipped to the Philippines and assigned to Operation Downfall, the planned Allied invasion of Japan. That invasion was unnecessary, as were, for the time being, the 500,000 purple heart medals manufactured for it. Since he never was involved in combat, I realized his reticence stemmed from other causes.
So my son's commissioning completed in a way an arc that had begun and been abruptly halted 70 years ago. I did not share the story or its implications of failure and irresolution with my son, who did not need the dead weight of this history. He'll have enough to carry when he gets to Ranger School in a few months.
All in all, despite my fear of breaking down, I handled myself pretty well. The only close call came when they darkened the auditorium to show a video with scenes of the cadets during their four years with some childhood appearances thrown in, accompanied of course by the usual emotive music. I bit down hard on my tongue and, like I just said, the room was dark.