This is an oldie but worth repeating, as it is Veteran's Day.
I grew up in the 1950's and 1960's in a working class neighborhood in Queens NYC surrounded by enlisted men who had served in WWII. One of my neighbors had been a sergeant in the Army who came ashore on D-Day. Another had been a cook who had been pressed into the front lines during the Battle of the Bulge. One of my first summer jobs as a short order cook had me surrounded by former Mess. Sergeants. My other summer employment in construction had me working alongside a former demolitions man who had been in the Philippines and had been among the first troops deployed to Japan. They were enlisted men, all. No one I knew or ever met had been an officer. It is hard to remember a pre WWII America that was a lot less wealthy, a place where only the rich could afford to go to college and the class lines were more firmly drawn. From these men I learned many things among them how to work, how to take orders and how to say. "Yes sir.". There are different ways to say "Yes Sir." On way means okay I'll do it right away. Another with a slightly different infliction of tone means. I'll do it but it's a dumb ass idea.
After I graduated from college, I got my first white collar job. I sat at a clean desk. I typed letters to people who were subscribers to Forbes Magazine about their subscriptions. I wore a shirt and tie and had the first job in my life where I didn't sweat, didn't get dirty and the only injury I could sustain was a paper cut. The owner at the time was Malcolm Forbes and while the term billionaire was not common the language as yet, he must have been a 700 or 800 dollar millionaire. He could be seen in the media hob knobbing with the celebrities of the day like Elizabeth Taylor on his Yacht or flying around in one of his hot air balloons. He was a great editor, writer, businessman, collector and connoisseur of fine dinning. He would frequent the many restaurants in Manhattan and write a review that would appear in Forbes magazine afterward. It wasn't a very large company and he would invite one of his employees along. I'd been there a little over a year when it was my turn.
So I went to dinner with the boss. Of course I thought there was a great gulf between us, him having 700 or 800 million dollars and me working for a few hundred a week. We went somewhere in the neighborhood of the office on 5th Avenue and 12th Street. It was an expensive place. It was a long time ago so I don't remember all of what we talked about. I do remember realizing that he was a brilliant man. Yet not the kind of man who tried to to impress you that he was the smartest guy in the room. And there was something odd I couldn't quite put my finger on. But it seemed to be that he had no pretenses. I was still young but I had already met enough college professors, managers and other people in charge, who were convinced of their great importance in this life and he wasn't.
I do remember that it had to be around 1975/76 because he wondered why Hubert Humphrey wasn't running who he liked and who was this guy Jimmy Carter? There are two things he told me that I still remember clearly. The first is kind of funny. A couple at the table next to us had ordered a bottle of wine. The waiter poured a little for the man to taste which he did and took a moment as if he were checking the quality and then nodded. He asked me what that little pantomime was done. I had seen it of course. I thought it had something to do with wine tasting but I told him I really didn't know. I wasn't going to lie. He smiled and explained how in years past if a wine bottle wasn't corked properly the wine might go sour. So a waiter would let you taste it to see if it was sour or not It had nothing to do with how good it was. He went on to explain that with modern processing of wine there wasn't much of a chance of that anymore. I think of that from time to time when I see someone in a restaurant take that little sip.
The second hit home. How we got on this subject, I don't remember. Maybe it was something in the news about a shooting. But it made me recall a time when I almost got shot and my friend did. I blurted it out in a rush because that's how it would replay in my mind. Why I told him. I didn't know. I have close friends and family members and to this day, I have never mentioned it to. Maybe I told him because he was older, wiser? Maybe I thought he could make sense of it? I sensed something? He told me it sounded traumatic. I had never realized that. Then he told me how he got shot.
Now what happened to me happened on a street corner and the richest guys in the world don't get shot on street corners. I also knew that not only was he rich but his father had been rich as well. So how the hell did he got shot? Well it was in WWII, as he explained. Then he said the thing I never forgot. He was a sergeant of a machine gun squad. He'd been hit in action somewhere I can't remember if it was in Germany or somewhere in France that sounded German. It know it was well into the Continent of Europe and it was way past D-Day. He'd been in combat a long time. Then he explained, it was the end of the war for him, almost apologetically.
All of a sudden the gulf between us was gone. He was like the Mess. Sergeants who taught me how to cook. Like the demolitions man who taught me how to gently put cement in between the cracks of worn out bricks, while working on a wood and rope scaffold, suspended some 4 or 5 stories off the ground. And Malcolm Forbes wasn't some guy with 700 or 800 million dollars. He was an enlisted man from WWII. He was one of them. He was like them and yet, no he wasn't. They had all been working class men. How many of them would have turned down officer's bars? Even if they had no personal ambition and it was only for the food and a better place to sleep? Malcolm Forbes was the son of a very rich man. He had graduated from Princeton. What was he doing as an enlisted man?
WWII was a time when rich man's sons could get commissions and be far away from combat. Also just being a college graduate would put you in line to be an officer on its own. I'm sure he could have done either, any time he wanted to. But he hadn't He had even been promoted through the ranks. They don't put you in charge of a machine gun squad because you went to Princeton. He had my respect in a way I'm sure I could not have articulated and he had no idea of. But it answered one other thing about him, the lack of pretense. I'd never met an enlisted man from WWII, who had any.
I worked there for another year or so and then moved on with my life. He died some years later and his passing was in all the media and yet there was nothing in there about his service during the war and no mention of his being an enlisted man.
Years later my wife was at a lecture at NYU and I parked the car near there, which was also near Forbes Magazine on 5th and 12th. The Forbes family had turned the lobby into a sort of little museum and I wandered in as I waited for my wife. The lobby was full of every thing from great art like the Faberge Eggs to rare toy trains, as Malcolm Forbes was a great collector of things. As I wandered around from display to display, I finally came upon a small display case in the corner. There was no name on it to tell who it was for or what it was. You might even mistake it for something else or just not even notice it. But in it were three medals and I recognized them; the Combat Infantryman's Badge which meant the holder had bee in the infantry and in combat for a sustained period of time, a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart. Unlike anyone else wandering around that little museum that day, I knew they were his.
I knew they were his because he'd been wounded a long time after D-Da so he'd earned his Combat Infantryman's Badge and the Purple Heart came from his wound. He'd never mentioned the Bronze Star. But that is typical of those guys. Just like my neighbor who came ashore on D-Day never mentioned his Purple Heart. His son only found about it by looking in an old suitcase.
I'll always remember the veterans I knew. Like I said they taught me many things. More importantly they risked their lives and paid the price in blood and horror for the freedom we enjoyed all our lives. Most of them were not famous at all. But I'll remember this veteran and not because he was famous. No, he's special because he asked for no favors. He wanted to be treated as if he was no different than anyone else, when he was.
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