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  In Honor of My Dad—and All Other Veterans

  Posted Tuesday, November 11, 2008 1:04 PM | By E.J. Graff

  My dad, who died one year and five days ago, was a Korean War vet; he volunteered for the Navy at 16, lying about his age. It was not something he ever mentioned. He once told me that talking about war inevitably glorifies it, and that he refused to do. But he always carefully displayed the flag on days that honored the nation—Fourth of July, Memorial Day, Veterans Day, and, of course, Inauguration Day (even for Richard Nixon, whom he loathed). 

  While he was dying, brutally and painfully and slowly, of bladder cancer, a consequence of the nicotine addiction he had kicked more than 30 years before (lungs recover from smoking but not the bladder—who knew?), we spent a lot of time just sitting around together in front of the TV. That’s when I found out that, every day, my father made sure that we listened in silence when names of the American soldiers who had died in Iraq were read aloud. If we missed it on TV, he himself would read it aloud from the paper. He hated the Iraq war, believing it was wasteful and destructive, both of their (the Iraqis’) country and of ours; he despised Bush for getting us into it, and for many other things. But we had to stop in quiet respect for those who had lost their lives in their country’s employ. 

  After he died, my stepmother pulled out a box of his medals—maybe a dozen, carefully displayed under glass. My three sibs and I were shocked. We had been given no hint that these existed. He wouldn’t tell her what some of them were for. We tried looking them up on the Web. Maybe he’d been downed in a top-secret mission behind North Korean lines. Or maybe he just wouldn’t talk about those medals lest doing so would glorify war.

  Filed under: veterans

About E.J. Graff

• E.J. Graff is associate director and senior researcher at Brandeis University's Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism, where she directs the Gender & Justice Project. She is a resident scholar at the Brandeis Women's Studies Research Center. As a journalist and author, her work has appeared in such venues as The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, Foreign Policy magazine, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, Columbia Journalism Review, Good Housekeeping, The Nation, The New Republic, and in more than a dozen anthologies. She collaborated on former Massachusetts Lt. Governor Evelyn Murphy's book Getting Even: Why Women Don't Get Paid Like Men--and What To Do About It (Simon & Schuster, 2005). Her first book, What Is Marriage For? The Strange Social History of Our Most Intimate Institution, has been widely cited in legal journals, reprinted for academic use, entered as courtroom exhibits, and quoted by government policymaking bodies.

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