During this past
Veterans' Week, and as Veteran's Day approaches tomorrow, November 12, 2012, I
have given a great deal of thought to my family's record of military service to
this country. On my father's side of the family, there is a story of two
brothers, Daniel and James, who immigrated from the west of Ireland to New York
City in the summer of 1864. They had no idea that the U.S. Congress had
passed the Enrollment Act in March 1863, and that they, as young men in their
twenties, would be forced to fight for their new country. The 69th
Infantry Regiment, also known as the "Fighting 69th," had consisted
primarily of Irish immigrants, but suffered devastating losses at
Chancellorsville (only 300 men survived) and then again at Gettysburg (where
they held the Wheatfield on the second day of battle until it was overrun by
Confederates) in 1863. The Lynch brothers joined the 1st Regiment of the
2nd Irish Brigade, which included the depleted ranks of the 69th. They
were at nine-month long "Siege of Petersburg," which was trench
warfare. One brother sustained a leg injury, but recovered from his
wound. Both brothers survived the war, and were at Appomattox when
General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Lt. General Ulysses S. Grant. Although
I haven't been able to document what happened to them after the war, Lynch
family oral history says that one brother settled in New York City, and the
other in Pittsfield, Massachusetts.
My maternal grandfather
George, son of two immigrants from Co. Derry in the north of Ireland, was born
in the Five Points area of New York in 1901. He was too young (and
suffered from pleurisy) and so could not serve in The Great War. He was
one of the younger brothers in a family of thirteen, and George went to work
for "The Edison," as ConEd was known. His adored eldest brother
Patrick had been lucky and smart enough to win a scholarship to Fordham
University where he studied engineering. As a civil engineer for The City
of New York, Patrick had participated in overseeing the installment of 107th
Regiment Monument, a bronze sculpture designed by Karl Morningstar Illava,
which is on Fifth Avenue and East 67th Street, right by Central Park. The
monument was dedicated in 1927 to "Seventh Regiment New York, One Hundred
and Seventh United States Infantry, 1917-1918." The Seventh Regiment
entered World War II with 3,000 officers and men. By war's end, they
suffered 1,918 casualties (dead, wounded, and those who later died from their
wounds).
Grandpa was in his
forties, the father of four children, when the U.S. joined World War II in
December 1941. However, his brother, my great-uncle, Patrick J.
McNicholl already had enlisted in the RAF before our country's official
involvement in the war. Uncle Patrick became a U.S. Army Colonel in the
317th Engineer Regiment, 92nd Infantry Division. The 92nd Infantry
Division was the only segregated unit of African-American soldiers to see
combat, and were crucial to winning the Italian campaign. They had the
nickname "Buffalo Soldiers,” which is what Native Americans called
African-American cavalrymen in the 19th century. After the war ended,
Uncle Patrick returned to the Bronx to his beloved wife Anne. I was very
young when he was very old, and I remember him as crusty and stoic. My
mother remembers him as a man who had a sense of fun, and who very much enjoyed
spending time with his nieces and nephews. I hold precious letters which
my grandfather wrote to his brother during the war.
My father Danny was
celebrating his fourteenth birthday in Jamaica, Queens when Victory over Japan
was declared in the United States on August 14, 1945. Five years later,
at the age of nineteen, he was U.S. Army Private serving in the Korean
"Conflict." He was wounded on August 14, 1951. Shrapnel
was spread throughout the lower part of his left leg. He refused morphine
from the Army medic because he wanted to be fully conscious when he arrived at
the MASH Unit in order to tell the surgeons that they were NOT amputating his
leg. Fortunately, in the years since World War II, military surgeons had
learned to do vascular grafts (dropping the amputation rate from 46.9% in that
war to 20.5% in the Korean War). The MASH surgeons repaired my father's
leg as best as they could. Then he was shipped to Japan, and then to his
first VA hospital in Hawaii. My father spent two years in VA hospitals in
the United States, most far from his home in Queens, before receiving an
honorable discharge in October 1953. He won The Purple Heart.
Daddy didn't talk much
about his service in Korea, although I was born at a V.A. hospital, and we used
to go to Fort Totten and, later, Mitchell Field to do our food and clothing
shopping when I was growing up. During the Ice Storm which hit on
December 16, 1973, the day before my eleventh birthday, he was trying to
comfort me in front of the fireplace, a fireplace in which he kept a fire
roaring to keep his family warm. He spoke about how cold it was in Korea.
(Aptly, David Halberstam's history of the Korean War is titled The
Coldest Winter.) He suffered a lot from that wounded leg, but he
suffered more from the invisible wound of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
(PTSD). My father self-medicated with alcohol. It's only in the
past few years that his brother, my Uncle Jimmy--yes, two Lynch brothers,
Daniel and James--explained how when they shared a bedroom in my grandmother's
apartment in the nine months before Jimmy married Diane, my father had terrible
nightmares. He would wake up both of them with his screams. Mostly,
my father Danny went to school at Pace College, where he studied accounting,
held an office job, hit the books, and enjoyed his life as a single guy.
(Until he met my mother in 1958, but that's another story.)
I grew up watching the
Vietnam War on television every night with Uncle Walter (Walter Cronkite).
I was left with the impressions and images of the horrors of war at a
very young age. Young men left our neighborhood in Queens whole, and came
back missing legs, or with heroin habits. Billy across the street
overdosed at age 20 in 1969. In the spring of 1973, I wept at the image
of John McCain's daughter running to greet him when he returned after
five-and-one-half years as a POW in Vietnam.
As an adult, I have
witnessed from afar many other wars and have been a student of military
history, and the reflection of war in literature and film. While I have
no doubt that war IS hell, I was, am and always shall be proud and
supportive of military personnel and veterans, and the part my family played in war. And especially to those who made the supreme sacrifice. I would not be a free citizen, someone who has the right to speak out and write about how wrong war is, if it were not for their service and sacrifice.
