Veteran's Day Long Ago and Far Away--Murfin Verse

 

This is a resurrection an old chestnut that I first read as a Chalice Lighting to open services at the old Congregational Unitarian Congregation in Woodstock, Illinois (now Tree of Life UU Congregation in Ridgefield. It was included in my 2004 Skinner House collection, We Build Temples in the Heart.

It was based on the memories of a boy from Cheyenne in the 1950s.  Reviewing it now, I am struck that the World War II is fast fading away.  In not too many years the last of them will be gone, just as I remember the passing of the last World War I vet at the age of 110 in 2011.  The cohort of their children, the so-called Baby Boomers are fast aging as well.  I am 77 and my friends with parents who served in what Studs Terkel called the Last Good War are about the same.

It occurs to me now that my grandchildren won’t understand much of what I wrote about.  They live in a different world.  World War II and post-war America are decades older for them than the Great War was for me.  Neither will they know or care about our Vietnam War choices obliquely referenced in the last lines.

 

                          

  One of those ubiquitous photos on the wall--First Lieutenant W. M. Murfin, U.S, Army Medical Corps on Leyte in the Philippines, 1943.

Pictures, Poppies, Stars and Generations

We knew war.

 

Somewhere in every home a handsome young man

            peered from a tinted photograph,

            overseas cap at a jaunty angle 

                        or the fifty-mission crush

                        or the crisp, square beanie of a gob.  

            usually someone’s Dad in some other life,

            but sometimes the ghost of someone frozen in time,

            caught in that picture like a fly in amber

            while bloody shreds were left draped on barbed wire

            ten feet from the high water on an anonymous beach,

            or splattered on the glass of the ball turret

            of a Mitchell bomber spiraling for an appointment

            with a German potato field,

            or bobbing in a sea of burning oil, naked and parboiled.

 

We knew pity.

 

                           

                                                             A  Buddy Poppy peddled on every street corner.
 

The veterans in neat blue uniforms,

            sleeves pinned to shoulders, ears shot away,

            noses burned off, faces twitching,

            fistfuls of red paper poppies in one hand,

            shaking white cans for nickels with the other.

            on every street corner, May and November

            and no decent man or woman passed

            without emptying pockets of change,

            twisting flowers into buttonholes, on to purse straps,

            without ever looking the peddler in the eye.

 

                    

                                                A Gold Star Flag represented a family member lost in the War.

 

We knew death.

 

Inside scrapbooks with brittle pages and fading ink,

            kept far up in the front hall closet behind hatboxes,

            surrounded by last winter’s scarves and mittens,

            between the leatherette boards bound by black shoelaces,

            amid the rations coupons, V-mails,

            postcards from exotic ports, Brownie snapshots,

            campaign maps, and yellowed clippings,

                        a small fringed flag,

                        white edged in red and blue,

                        a gold star in the center.

 

                           

                                                     We raided our Dads' footlockers and haunted surplus stores for our play wars.

In the neighborhood we looted footlockers and duffel bags,

            saved our allowances for forays to the Army/Navy Store,

            outfitted ourselves in helmet liners, webbed belts,

            canteens and mess kits, cast–off khaki and drab,

                        and amid the prairie burrs and grasses,

                        between the wild rose hedge and lilac caves,

                        on top of the car port, in the window wells,

                        every summer day we tried to sort glory from horror.

 

We knew war and pity and death—

            we thought.

 

And then—suddenly—it was our turn for real.

 

—Patrick Murfin

A Murfin Memoir of My Own Private Missile Crisis

Dad and I listened on the car radio when President Kennedy addressed the nation about the Cuban Missile Crisis and his eyeball to eyeball showdown with the Soviets.

Note—63 years ago the Cuban Missile Crisis riveted and terrified the American public, including a 13-year-old in Cheyenne. This is my recycled memoir of that.

I was in my father’s car.  I believe it was his official State of Wyoming 1962 Chevrolet station wagon.  We had the radio on.  Dad was doing me a favor.  He was a man of infinite patience that way.  We had just visited the Quonset hut that served as the official headquarters of Wyoming Civil Defense.  I had in my lap a box stuffed full of literature on how to build a bomb shelter, plan an emergency evacuation, explanations of the public shelter program, blue tri-fold brochures emblazoned with the triangle-in-a-circle logo of Your Civil Defense!

The literature was destined for the Civil Defense office that I had set up on folding tables outside my basement bedroom.  Ever since the election in 1960 when John Kennedy kept talking about the missile gap I had been obsessed with what seemed like an inevitable nuclear war. 

In Cheyenne, where America’s first ICBM base had been built at Francis E. Warren Air Force Base, it was hard to avoid.  It was a matter of some civic pride that the missile base made us “one of the top ten nuclear targets.”  Students at Eastwood Elementary School regularly conducted air raid drills.  Sometimes we were instructed to duck under our desks and cover our heads with a thick textbook.  Other times we were taken out to the empty field across the street and told to lie face down with our hands interlaced behind our heads.  This was so the atomic blast could “roll over us.” We were also told not to look up lest the flash of the exploding bomb burn our eyeballs out.

Other kids might have shrugged it off.  But I was a patriot.  I wanted to do something for my country, just like President Kennedy had said.  I was informed.  I read both the Wyoming Eagle and the Tribune and got my own copy of Time every week in the mail.  Ok, it may have been a little unusual for a thirteen year old boy, but that’s the way I was.  

                                            The Rockefeller civil defense report helped set off the fallout shelter craze of the early '60's.  I read it avidly and took it to heart.

At some point I had gotten a hold of New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s report on Civil Defense and actually read it.  It was meant to shore up a proposal that the state of New York build public shelters, but it had become the inspiration for the fall-out shelter craze that was sweeping the nation.  I was among those swept.  For some months I had been visiting the CD Quonset hut and gathering literature.   I obtained a nice Civil Defense decal which I put on the glass of our front storm door.  I even found a real white Civil Defense helmet from World War II at an Army surplus store.  I buttonholed everyone I could think of to promote preparedness.

And my Dad took in stride.  Maybe he knew that I just felt better thinking that there was something that I could do.  He drove me on my trips to the Quonset hut and probably used his clout as a member of the Wyoming cabinet to get them to give me all the literature I wanted.  They had plenty.  

Despite his tolerance of my obsession, Dad refused to build a backyard fallout shelter.

But despite my pleas, Dad would not build us our own shelter.  Not for him the trouble and expense of digging a big hole in the backyard, lining it with re-enforced concrete, installing a blast proof steal door and an efficient ventilation system, stocking it with food and water for our family of four for at least six months, and, yes keeping a good rifle on hand to shoot the improvident neighbors who had not planned ahead.  No, he just wouldn’t do it.  Looking back on it, I suspect that he knew an atomic explosion in the neighborhood with either not survivable or not worth surviving.

Anyway, that’s what we were doing at 5 pm Mountain Standard Time on October 21, 1962 when Kissin’ KIMN out of Denver, Colorado interrupted their regular broadcast of top 40 rock & roll “to bring you the President of the United States.”  We drove home in silence listening to details of our confrontation the Communist Russia over those missiles in Cuba. 

Except for school time, I was glued to the TV set for the next two weeks eager to hear any glimmer of news.  Late at night I used Dad’s old Atwater Kent table radio which could pick up short wave broadcasts from just about anywhere, including the BBC and even English language broadcasts from Radio Havana.  We all breathed easier when we got the word that the Ruskies had folded and were shipping their rockets back home.

I found a World War II Civil Defense helmet like this at the Army surplus store.

But what about next time?  There was sure to be a next time.  I got to thinking about those school drills and decided that they were not enough.  The school needed a real Civil Defense plan.  So, I started writing one.  I typed copies out on my new Sterling Smith-Corona portable with several sheets of onion skin and carbon paper.  Each homeroom, I proposed, should have an elected student Warden to help the teacher with evacuation plans and keep order.  The Wardens should be equipped with helmets, webbed belts with a water canteen and first aid kit, and police night stick just in case there was panic.  I went down to the Army surplus store and priced helmets and clubs.  In addition, each classroom was to have a box containing emergency supplies, which students would be required to bring from home—things like toilet paper and bags for excrement, bandages and first aid supplies, a flashlight, a transistor radio, and plenty of batteries.  In case of an attack the Warden and teacher were to scoop up the box and guide the class in an orderly manner to a designated shelter, which would adequately be stocked with K-rations and drums of water.

One morning I took my bundle of papers and presented them to the Principal, who solemnly accepted them.  He told me he would take the matter up with the School Board.  And he actually did!  A few weeks later I was told that my plan had been approved not just for Eastridge, but for the entire school system.  Of course, they made some changes.  The helmets and night sticks were out, but they would allow the student Wardens to have nice official looking arm bands.  They had students in the Junior High shop classes make boxes from galvanized sheet metal.  Every homeroom got one and kids got lists of what to bring from home to fill them.

These signs were ubiquitous in public buildings, schools, large office and commercial structures, and other places.  You could occasionally find them well into the current century long after the shelters they marked were abandoned or forgotten.

Sometime the next spring there were elections for student Wardens.  Everyone in the school knew that the whole thing was my idea.  But in my homeroom, I was not even nominated.  One of the popular kids, one of the guys who were always picked first in gym class, was elected unanimously. 

The next week when the student Wardens had their first meeting to organize and learn about the program after school, I just went home.  The principal asked me why I had not come to explain my plan.  I told him that I wasn’t elected and didn’t feel I should.  He shrugged and went about his business.

  

Classic Murfin Verse for Veterans Day—Pictures, Poppies, Stars and Generations

  

This is a resurrection of an old chestnut that I first read as a Chalice Lighting to open services at the old Congregational Unitarian Congregation in Woodstock, Illinois about 2000.  I read it subsequently when the congregation moved and was renamed the Tree of Life UU Congregation in McHenry.  It was included in my 2004 Skinner House collection, We Build Temples in the Heart.

It was based on the memories of a boy from Cheyenne in the 1950s.  Reviewing it now, I am struck that the World War II ended 80 years ago and is fading fast from memory.  Almost all who served them are gone now, just as I remember the passing of the last World War I vet at the age of 110 in 2011.  The cohort of their children, the so-called Baby Boomers are fast aging as well.  I am 76 and my friends with parents who served in what Studs Terkel called the Last Good War are about the same.

It occurs to me now that my grandchildren don’t understand much of what I wrote about.  They live in a different world.  World War II and post-war America are decades older for them than the Great War was for me.  Neither they neither know nor care about our Vietnam War choices obliquely referenced in the last lines.

  

                                  One of those ubiquitous photo on the wall--First Lieutenant W. M. Murfin, U.S, Army Medical Corps on Leyte in the Philippines, 1943. 

Pictures, Poppies, Stars and Generations

We knew war.

 

Somewhere in every home a handsome young man

            peered from a tinted photograph,

            overseas cap at a jaunty angle 

                        or the fifty-mission crush

                        or the crisp, square beanie of a gob.  

            usually someone’s Dad in some other life,

            but sometimes the ghost of someone frozen in time,

            caught in that picture like a fly in amber

            while bloody shreds were left draped on barbed wire

            ten feet from the high water on an anonymous beach,

            or splattered on the glass of the ball turret

            of a Mitchell bomber spiraling for an appointment

            with a German potato field,

            or bobbing in a sea of burning oil, naked and parboiled.

 

We knew pity. 

 

 

                                     A  Buddy Poppy peddled on every street corner. 

 

The veterans in neat blue uniforms,

            sleeves pinned to shoulders, ears shot away,

            noses burned off, faces twitching,

            fistfuls of red paper poppies in one hand,

            shaking white cans for nickels with the other.

            on every street corner, May and November

            and no decent man or woman passed

            without emptying pockets of change,

            twisting flowers into buttonholes, on to purse straps,

            without ever looking the peddler in the eye.

 

We knew death.

 

 

                         A Gold Star Flag represented a family member lost in the War. 

 

Inside scrapbooks with brittle pages and fading ink,

            kept far up in the front hall closet behind hatboxes,

            surrounded by last winter’s scarves and mittens,

            between the leatherette boards bound by black shoelaces,

            amid the rations coupons, V-mails,

            postcards from exotic ports, Brownie snapshot,

            campaign maps, and yellowed clippings,

                        a small fringed flag,

                        white edged in red and blue,

                        a gold star in the center.

 

                                    We raided our Dads' footlockers and haunted surplus stores for our play wars. 

 

In the neighborhood we looted footlockers and duffel bags,

            saved our allowances for forays to the Army/Navy Store,

            outfitted ourselves in helmet liners, webbed belts,

            canteens and mess kits, cast–off khaki and drab,

                        and amid the prairie burrs and grasses,

                        between the wild rose hedge and lilac caves,

                        on top of the car port in the window wells,

                        every summer day we tried to sort glory from horror.

 

We knew war and pity and death—

            we thought.

 

And then—suddenly—it was our turn for real.

 

—Patrick Murfin