Father's Day 1952

The last time I saw my father was in 1952. I don't know the exact date, but for me it will remain Father's Day for the rest of my life. My father had been gone from the home for some time and on this particular day he had returned to visit my brother and I. I recall sitting at his feet as he played with my younger brother on his lap. He was dressed in the fashion of the day, cowboy boots, leather jacket, white tee shirt and levis. He was my hero, the under current of confict between him and my mother was never revealed to our young eyes. When it became time for him to leave we followed him to the sidewalk and watched as he walked into the distance and out of our lives forever. I suffered his loss, almost every day I would stand looking down the street waiting to see him reappear. I was told by my mother, not wanting me to know the truth, that he had gone off to fight in Korea. When he never returned I began to make up stories that he had been killed in the war. later, when I learned the truth, it left a scar that never quite healed.

Fifty years later, after an extensive online search I found my father again. He has passed on in 1985, but left the legacy of three other brothers, two of whom I was able to get to know and reconstruct my father's life. In two posts last year, I recounted his life. A Thanksgiving Tribute to my Dad and Tribute continued: .

I was lucky, instead of being left to being raised solely by my mother, my grandfather took up the challenge to make sure I was raised with some sense of direction and values. I have never publicly acknowledged his role. Looking back, being raised by someone who was born in 1886, gave me lessons that were first passed on to my mother, one of those who became know as the "Greatest Generation." I grew up with a sense of community service, so strong that when I graduated from high school, I joined the Army, just as my father had joined the Navy, December 8, 1941, and like ancestors on my mother's side, had done in every war since before the Revolution. Work was something that mattered, you did your job, but family came first, obligations were accepted and promises kept.

I was not the perfect incarnation of a throwback member of that generation. I have many of the traits of my cohorts in the "boomer" generation. But true to form, as we age into our elder years, we find ourselves becoming visionary, so that before we step off the world stage, we might be able to recover our mis-spent youth.

I am blessed have two daughters, two step-sons and a son. They have made me a grandfather six, and soon to be seven times. Their love and the pleasure it gives me to see them grow and mature is a reward that my father missed. My grandfather, E.E. Campbell, did not miss that chance, he lived to see his grand children give him great-grandchildren and passed with the knowledge that he had led a life that counted and would be remembered.

Today, I remember him and my father, and pause to whisper into the wind that I love them both and thank them for what they gave me.

U.S. Navy in the 21st Century

Prior to World War II, the United States Navy was the arm of sovereign power that represented the United States outside the continent. The Army was a defensive organization charged with protecting the 48 states and territories.

Today as the Army is found sourced out across the globe in commitments ranging from security to low intensity war, the Navy is having to assume the old role of projecting "Soft Power" in the finest tradition of Alfred Thayer Mahan. One blog that I try and read daily is perhaps the best non government source for naval affairs I have found. Information Dissemination written by Galrahn brings you all you ever want to know about the latest in what is happening at sea.

His recent posts have been watching the developing story that he labels Soft Power and Global Fleet Stations. The Navy has dispatched two Military Sealift Command ships:

USNS 2nd LT John P. Bobo and USNS LCPL Roy M. Wheat to the coast of Monrovia, Liberia, in the Gulf of Guinea March 20, to participate in a sea-basing and humanitarian aid distribution exercise in conjunction with U.S. Marines and Africa Partnership Station ships USS Fort McHenry and HSV-2 Swift.

Galrahn thinks:

The promise of this capability in the future could change the way the Navy provides humanitarian assistance in the future, and also potentially change the way amphibious assault is conducted in the future.

The role of the Navy is returning to one that navies preformed a century ago, when they patrolled the sea lanes against pirates, provided humanitarian assistance and were the uniformed ambassadors making port calls on every continent.

Adding to this observation is an article on Military.com Study Calls for 'Soft Power' Tactics. The article quotes a study by the Rand Corp where they observe:

"America's goal must be to defuse such a war, not to wage and win it," the Rand study asserts. "Trying to crush insurgency by military brute force in the Muslim world risks validating the jihadists' claim, increasing their appeal, and replacing their losses."

Force "is but one instrument of counterinsurgency ... It ought to be subordinate to a political strategy of offering the people a government deserving of their support," the report adds.

Chet Richards, retired Air Force officer and expert on John Boyd's OODA loop strategy writes.

"Our defense establishment has suffered some 4,000 fatal casualties, forced the Army into offering enlistment bonuses of $40,000 to raw recruits, begun a program of buying armored jeeps that cost a million dollars each, and run up a generational spending obligation" likely to top $2 trillion."

"We did all this not while engaging some worthy foe armed with tanks, missiles and aircraft similar to ours, nor while contending with massed armies of skilled troops on fields of battle. No, we incurred these costs while trying to suppress resistance to our occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, resistance by lightly armed civilians and poorly equipped militias."

Sadly, these two paragraphs are similar in tone to what some British leaders were observing about America in 1780.

The good news in the article is the US Navy, Marines and Coast Guard seem to have a strategy.

The Navy, lacking a front-line role in land wars against groups such as al-Qaida, is implementing a new global strategy that recasts it as an arm of diplomacy and a vehicle for humanitarian aid.
More than a year in the making, the strategy argues that the sea service is uniquely positioned to respond to insurgencies. Their ships, Navy leaders argue, can serve as offshore bases from which troops and civilian workers can move inland to quell violence and provide aid without becoming provocative occupiers.
"We believe that preventing wars is as important as winning wars," the chiefs of the Navy, Marine Corps and Coast Guard declared in a statement accompanying release of the strategy.

All the above paragraph is along the lines of the strategic vision that Tom Barnett has been lecturing and writing about for almost a decade. He should be proud to see the chickens coming home to roost.

I hold out hope that our military seems to get it and is making the changes. Our State Department and other government agencies are so riddled with ingrained and inbred relationships that they refuse to change. Even the Pentagon, away from the front has made decisions that will leave you disgusted. Supplier Under Scrutiny on Aging Arms for Afghans. The novel Catch-22, was fiction, but this story reads like it should be.

We should all be proud of the efforts of our service people. I hold a special place in my heart for the Navy. My dad joined the day after Pearl Harbor and served in the Pacific till the war ended. A Thanksgiving Tribute to my Dad and Tribute continued: It is good to see the traditions and the original mission of our Navy is being revived.

Tribute continued:

After Tarawa, the Zeilin sailed back to California for refitting. It was during this visit that my mother and father met during a USO dance. The war kept them apart for a bit longer when the Zeilin sailed again to the shores of Kawajalein Atoll delivering the 7th Infantry Division into the jaws of death. After this last assault, my dad having served in a combat zone for two years was sent back to the states for rest and recuperation. During this time he married my mother. The next assignment was to the new aircraft carrier Bon Homme Richard being fitted out on the East Coast. My Dad joined her and became a plank owner, (first crew). The ship sailed for the Pacific in early 1945. They arrived in time for the final months of combat around Japan. The service record that I was able to obtain from the Navy, relate those final months in a single sentence. "Participated in 15 air strikes against targets in Japan, final strike recalled due to surrender."

My father returned to a world where he felt was a different person. The scars of war had left him emotionally wounded. He took a job driving a long-haul truck and partied like a rock-star. The toll on the marriage was fatal. The last time I saw him was during a visit when I was about 5 years old. He was wearing Levi's and a white shirt under a fringed leather jacket that was popular in the fifties, he hugged me and said he'd be back, I watched him as he walked away down the street never to return. I went fifty years wondering why.

The history I uncovered about his life during the war, and the stories that Vince, my long lost brother relayed to me brought his life into focus. My Dad, like thousands of other dads and young men who never would become dads, paid a price to rid the world of totalitarianism.

I never had the chance to tell my father how proud I was of his service and how much I loved him; in this little way I make that declaration to his soul.

A Thanksgiving Tribute to my Dad

The layout of this blog begins with a photo of the USS John C. Pope as it departs San Francisco bound for Southeast Asia. The date on the photo is unknown, but serves to illustrate my departure for Vietnam on Thanksgiving Day, 1966. As I look back on my life this voyage was the gateway event that eventually led to this blog. I cannot plea to being a decorated combat veteran. I saw my share of war and the horrors that color that world. The aftermath of Vietnam left no visible impression on me but emotionally it struck a chord deep within my soul. For years after I returned the very sight of anyone Asian left me with a sense of distress. The Fall of Saigon in 1975 only added to this feeling. Years flew by, I raised a family, got divorced, started a new family, moved on, and again found myself searching. I began to look back on my life.

My dad a World War II sailor, had left when I was five, leaving me to wonder what had happened to him and why he left. A long Internet search led me to his grave. Along the way I discovered that I had three brothers from three families that my father had started and left. Out that revelation I found the history of my father and perhaps why he lived the way he did.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Zeilin_(AP-9)

Jay Wade my dad, enlisted in the Navy December 8, 1941. He was assigned to the USS Zeilin, an attack transport. His first voyage was to a little place called Guadalcanal in August of 1942. He was a gunner's mate on a 20mm. The Zeilin supported the Battle for Guadalcanal from August until November 11, 1942, on that date aircraft attacked the anchorage. The Zeilin fought back and was credited with downing one plane, two near misses ruptured the plates and she withdrew to the West Coast for repairs. Over the next two years the Zeilin carried troops to Alaska, then back to Califonia to star in the movie, Guadalcanal Diary. Then back to the South Pacific to deliver the 2nd Marine Division to a place named Tarawa. It was here that the men of the Zeilin first saw the way the war in the Pacific would be fought. In the photo above right, my father the dark haired guy, can be seen standing in the upper right side, hunched next to the life rafts. The men of the Zeilin are holding services for men killed in action at Tarawa.