Did anyone in the family play a part in history? 

By Thomas G.

My father-in-law, William F. McCabe, volunteered to join the military shortly after the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. He was just a boy back then, a farm kid, and he’d never been anywhere. But President Roosevelt had called the country to arms, and he and his friends responded in a gigantic patriotic wave that was unlike anything seen before or since. Millions of boys just like my father-in-law left home to fight. They did what was necessary, they defended their country, and over 400,000 of them never returned. But it was through their actions and heroism that he and his brethren changed the course of history.

William had never seen the ocean so he joined the navy. He volunteered for the silent service so that he could become a mechanic and learn how to repair diesel engines. He thought that it might be a useful skill to have after he returned to the farm after the war. Little did he know at the time that the U.S. submarine service was to suffer the highest casualty rate and to be the most dangerous of all US military services in World War II; 52 US navy submarines were sunk, and one out of every five American submariners were killed.

Bill signed his enlistment papers, married his high school sweetheart, and left Iowa for basic training and mechanic’s school. Afterwards he was assigned to the crew of the USS Finback, a Gato-class submarine based out of Pearl Harbor, and he was immediately dispatched from there to the Midway Islands in anticipation of a coming Japanese attack. Lois, his new wife, moved to the West Coast to be closer to him.

The Finback participated in the battle of Midway, only the first fight in the history of this storied boat. With 12 war patrols between 1942 and the end of the war, spanning the Pacific from the Aleutian Islands to Tokyo Bay, and surviving multiple depth charge attacks, the Finback sank a total of 69,386 tons of enemy shipping. But it wasn’t the sinking of enemy warships that brought the boat its greatest notoriety; it was on September 2nd, 1944, that the Finback and my father-in-law made their mark on history. That was the day Bill McCabe picked a young pilot out of the water who had been shot down off the coast of Chichi Jima, an island about 150 miles north of Iwo Jima in the Ogasawara Island chain.

Chichi Jima was a heavily fortified jungle island used by the Japanese as an airfield and communications base, and because of its fortifications, rather than a seaborne invasion the island was instead subjected to numerous and persistent aerial attacks and bombardments. More than 100 US airmen were shot down during those attacks. Only three of the downed airmen were rescued by US submarines.

Bill McCabe, while on watch, spotted an airman in the water after one such attack. The boat was maneuvered to pick up the downed airman and my father-in-law pulled him out of the water. There is a photograph of the incident on display at the Pearl Harbor Naval Museum in Honolulu. You should go see it if you have a chance. And while he was just another kid, one of many who fought in that war, the rescued airman grew up to be a leader of our country; he grew up to be the 41st President of the United States, and 45 years after his rescue he invited all surviving members of the Finback’s crew to his inauguration. My father-in-law didn’t attend that inauguration; by then he’d contracted cancer; he would have liked to have been there. It would have been one of the highlights of his life. The airman he pulled out of the water all those years ago was George Herbert Walker Bush.

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What did you do in the war, Daddy?

By Joseph Z

Below is an excerpt from a piece I wrote for the N.Y. Times on the 50th anniversary of the Tet Offensive, which erupted a month or so after my arrival in Vietnam. The Tet Offensive significantly ratcheted up combat intensity, and basically marked the end of the U.S. effort to win the war, due to its political impact back home. 

“When I arrived in Vietnam in late December 1967, I thought we might be winning the war. Gen. William Westmoreland, the American commander in Saigon, had just given a speech in Washington stating that the end was beginning “to come into view.” As a 25-year-old Army captain assigned to be Westmoreland’s special assistant, I would be handling highly classified intelligence for him, as well as sensitive communications we called the ‘back channel’.

The atmosphere at the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam headquarters, or MACV, was intense but orderly. However the relative equilibrium I’d found on arrival changed abruptly. In early January I tried to phone one of my roommates from West Point, who was commanding an infantry company upcountry. I finally reached his first sergeant. He gave me a crisp and brutal report: “Sir, you’re too late. The C.O. tripped a booby trap this morning crossing a stream bed on patrol in the Bong Son Plain area. His last words were, ‘Top, come get me.’”

Not long after that phone call, I was awakened at about 3 a.m. by explosions near my quarters. I grabbed my .45 and ran downstairs in my shorts to help organize a perimeter defense. Helicopter gunships were firing rockets into a cemetery a couple of blocks away. We secured a Military Police jeep to establish a line of communication, but a wounded soldier somewhere had grabbed a push-to-talk handset and wouldn’t let go, alternately pleading for help with his injury and describing armed Vietnamese, presumably Vietcong, advancing on his position. A coordinated, large-scale enemy assault had erupted throughout South Vietnam at the beginning of the Vietnamese New Year; the Tet offensive had begun.

An armed convoy came to my quarters to take me and others to MACV. There were a large number of top-secret documents in my office that needed to be destroyed. I went outside to burn the papers in a special incinerator but had to take cover from the enemy rounds ricocheting off the incinerator, fired at me from across the street.

Tet put everyone on an acute war footing, but I found that it also relaxed formalities. I showed Westmoreland a classified message concerning the surface-to-air Talos missile, which was to be used to shoot down enemy aircraft. He wrote a note on the message, explained to me its meaning and told me to meet with the commanding general of the 7th Air Force at Tan Son Nhut to coordinate rules of engagement — a mission otherwise way above my pay grade.

There was also a kind of camaraderie that developed under the pressure of Tet and its aftermath. I was impressed by the relationship between Westmoreland and his deputy (and soon to be successor), Gen. Creighton Abrams. The two had graduated the same year from West Point, 1936. Both had distinguished themselves in combat during World War II, Westmoreland under Gen. Maxwell Taylor and Abrams under Gen. George Patton. I saw nothing but mutual regard between the two, observing occasions when Westmoreland would ask something of “Abe,” who would respond in his gravelly voice, with familiarity yet deference for all to see: “Yes, sahr.”

I remember one particular private conversation I had with Abrams. Shortly after Tet, American forces had suffered a combat setback near a region nicknamed the Parrot’s Beak. After I asked about the engagement during a customary daily briefing I gave him, Abrams rose from his simple steel desk, picked up a cigar, pulled out a telescoped pointer, squatted down in front of a map board in his office, described the disposition of friendly and enemy forces, and explained why he thought things had not gone well — the sort of careful, thorough response a general officer would give a peer, near-equal or a visiting dignitary, but not a junior officer like me. I had been nervous asking the question, and deeply surprised with his response; by such grace is loyalty cemented. 

The intensity of the fighting during Tet also concentrated the chain of command. Signals intelligence indicated a noteworthy movement of the North Vietnamese Army in I Corps, the tactical area immediately below the Demilitarized Zone that included Hue, the imperial city of Vietnam that was largely occupied by enemy forces during Tet. Westmoreland was away, so I woke Abrams and showed him the information. Bleary-eyed, he asked for pencil and paper. Sitting on the side of his bed, he deliberately wrote an articulate operations order that I sent to the Marine commanding general in the area, moving artillery, armored, airborne and infantry units to respond to the threat, stating that he would establish a jump command post and arrive the next day. The occupation of Hue was eventually lifted. The fighting around Hue was later dramatized in Stanley Kubrick’s award-winning Vietnam war movie, “Full Metal Jacket."

Tensions remained high. At the end of March, I received from the White House an advance copy of the speech President Lyndon Johnson was scheduled to make to the nation on March 31. It did not contain the passage in which he declared he would not run for another term; that he added, secretly, at almost the last minute. I printed copies and went to Westmoreland’s conference room, where he had gathered with Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker, Abrams and others. Westmoreland asked when the speech would be delivered. I responded with the hour and minute, Saigon time. Abrams barked: “How come you’re always so goddamned positive?”

The next month, President Johnson promoted Westmoreland to chief of staff of the Army and named Abrams to replace him. Although I was awarded a Bronze Star for my performance in Vietnam, I’m most proud of a letter of commendation I received from the commanding general of the Americal Division, in which I had commanded my own small unit following my assignment in Saigon. Major General Charles Gettys, who later became Abrams’ chief of staff at MACV, wrote of “the high regard General Creighton Abrams, our commander in Vietnam, told me he had for you.”

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Who do you think of on Veterans Day?
By Terence T.

Often we veterans are asked to stand for recognition on or around Veteran’s Day. I always felt a little uncomfortable standing and being recognized by my peers, until I realized that it was not me at all that was being recognized. My friends were thanking those they couldn’t thank by recognizing a person in the flesh, not an idea, not a faded photo, not an article in the paper, but someone in the flesh. So for the last several years when asked to stand, I stand for Billy, Chuck, Roger, sons of other mothers who gave their lives years ago. And yes, James.

I have not given much consideration to my own military service; after all I was seeing patients as a member of the Air Force Biomedical Services Corp. Pretty cushy at first blush. My first duty station was Little Rock AFB in Jacksonville, Arkansas. My most memorable moment of that quick stint was a hop I bummed with a C-130 crew on a training mission as they practiced dropping supplies by parachute from low altitude into the Arkansas countryside. They even made me strap up with a chute when they opened the rear gate and started shoving off jeeps and boxes into the slipstream. What I would have done if I had slipped out the back, I do not know. They did a couple of short field take offs, jamming my strapped-in backside into the hard seat as they threw the nose of that workhorse into the air. I didn’t tell them the closest thing I had been to air flight up to that point, any flight, was watching Sky King on TV. 

In a few months we were moved to Oahu, Hawaii, and were stationed at Wheeler AFB, working five day weeks, no nights, no remote duty. I drove each morning through the bucolic cane fields and ramshackle plantations to see active duty personnel and their dependents at our small dispensary. Although news of the ongoing Vietnam conflict screamed at us from the air waves and newspapers, we lived and worked in an insular world a long way from the front lines.

I saw a lot of guys on both ends of their South East Asia rotation in our eye clinic. Before they left they were quick to laugh, their captain’s bars highly polished like their shoes, their khakis without a wrinkle. They came back almost to a man gaunt, hollow eyed, still short haired but somewhat disheveled, not very conversational, sitting with other combat vets at the O Club, away from those of us who knew nothing of their inner fears or their victories or their losses.

I started paying more attention to the returning pilots and support personnel. They were casual but distant, affable enough but reserved. One of the returnees, James, was twenty, single, liked music, and wore a stethoscope draped around the back of his neck during duty hours. He was quick to respond to any of the physicians who needed assistance, drawing blood, wrapping an ankle, cleaning up an exam room. Always with a smile. He liked to drop into the eye clinic on a slack moment and shoot the breeze with my assistant and me. 

I discovered over the next year that this was to be his last duty station. He was going to get out of the military, maybe go to medical school. Maybe not. He was from Oakland. Had family there. Life was going to be an adventure. One day James bee-bopped in, did a dance, and announced he had a girlfriend, a real girlfriend. Certainly, I was not surprised. Good looking and friendly, what was not to like about James? He had plenty of social life, plenty of dates, plenty of busy weekends. Certainly, no surprise. James became a little more serious in his conversations with me over the next months. Yes, he thought a lot of this girl; she thought a lot of him, and so forth. In fact, he announced one day that they were going to get married. The wedding day came and went a small very private affair. Just James and his bride and a couple of witnesses.

“Did you hear about James?” our exec stopped me on my way into the office a few days after the wedding. “He’s been shot!” Oh, no! Not James. And no he was not OK and he was not going to live and he might be dead right now. I grabbed one of his friends and this big strapping buck sergeant was weeping when he turned around to face me. “James is dead. He is dead. He is really dead.” I leaned up against the wall trying to catch my breath. No way, I thought. No way. No way.

James was driving to work that morning through the remote cane fields with his carpool buddy when a car pulled up alongside theirs, the window rolled down, a sawed off 12 gauge slid out the window and caught James with a full blast.

James was buried in Punchbowl, the military cemetery. I was awed by the rows of flat granite headstones, flags everywhere, the immensity and the beauty of this cemetery. I got there early and walked among the rows reading some of the names and dates. It was sobering to say the least. How many of these men, many young, were like James, taken from life when life itself seemed to offer the most promise? James was buried with full military honors, gunfire, taps and the whole works. James did not die in the line of duty. But he did die in uniform at the hand of the enemy, and nonetheless, he was dead.

I think about James and his lot in life and death. Yes, he was a veteran, and he did die while in uniform. He is one of the men I think of at Veterans Day, a sad unnecessary death in a violent unforgiving world.

We vets were once asked at church to stand to be recognized and, this was new, for prayer to cover any unpleasant debris left over in our minds from our days in the military. I sat next to a friend of mine whom I knew had been in the thick of it in South East Asia, an M-60 machine gun jockey, one who knew what it was like to see men die in combat, friends and enemy alike. I sat there with one arm around his shoulder, one hand resting palm up, my eyes closed wondering what was going through his mind, those distant forty year old memories. Was it the noise, the recoil of the M-60 and what that 25 pound weapon did to his shoulders, the 100 round belts of 7.62 ammo, nights on patrol, the blood, the anguish of the dying, the jungle latrines, the heartache of American indifference, the too infrequent letters from home?

Then an unknown woman came unseen from behind me and whispered in my ear, “Thank you.” It hit me. I have expressed my thanks to vets before, but no one has ever said thanks to me. It was like she didn’t know I had that cushy job in the land of continuous summer. And then I remembered, she was thanking those who could no longer hear, too many too long forgotten and then remembered on this day at this moment. Maybe a brother or uncle, maybe a high school classmate, maybe the kid who lived down the street.

And then I mouthed a silent “Thank you” of my own as I squeezed back tears through closed lids and stared at the floor between blinks. “God bless America,” I thought. Thank you for freedom; thank you for the brave. Thanks Billy. Thank you Chuck and Roger. Thank you, James.