SONS OFF TO EUROPE

(Published in the Contra Costa Times on Memorial Day, 1995)


This Spring I will be attending three graduations--my daughter's from graduate school, my older son's from college, and my younger son's from high school. Our family will also be celebrating my wife's 50th birthday--she was born exactly on V-E Day itself! As my children look forward with hope and optimism to their new lives, and in the midst of all of these wonderful family celebrations, my own thoughts turn to remembrances and gratefulness.

Coincidental with this 50th anniversary of V-E Day, both of my sons independently settled on the idea of marking their graduations by backpacking abroad this summer with a few of their best buddies to see the sights of Western Europe. My wife has felt a bit of maternal trepidation about their plans, especially the younger one's, even though he has traveled or lived abroad the past two summers. But, as their father, I can tell you I have a very different take on this bit of freedom my sons are exercising.

This summer is 50 years since the end of World War II! Fifty years since the liberation of Auschwitz and the loss of 6 million Jews! Fifty years since the Russian war dead numbered 20 million! And fifty years since the execution of Mussolini and the death of Hitler! Fifty years later, and my sons are the beneficiaries of all those who fell at Normandy, on Omaha and Utah Beach. My 22 and 18 year-old young men will be off to Europe with backpacks bought at our local mountaineering store, not government-issue duffel bags. They will leave with water bottles for hiking in the serene hills of Italy and France, not with canteens and mess kits issued by the military to help them survive battle-torn Europe. And they will buy eurail passes to crisscross Europe freely, not find themselves herded into cattle cars headed for a certain death in a concentration camp.

How does a father like me thank all those men lying under crosses and stars in Europe's battlefields and war cemeteries? How do I convey to my sons the good fortune they have to live in this generation, not the one that came of age fifty years ago? Who was looking over them and me when our turn came to travel this way?

I'm not a "love it or leave it" patriotic type, but I do like to fly the American flag on the Federal Holidays. I don't like it that school kids today have little sense of why they don't go to school on Memorial Day. There seems to be little appreciation for how the freedoms we take for granted were earned--most young people simply feel entitled to it.

If we can remember what this last fifty years has wrought, then there should be little but gratefulness that would fill our hearts. Had World War II ended differently, one can only try to imagine the nightmare that would have followed. Surely, none of us would have a life as we know it, or even have a life at all! From my perspective, I can honestly say, it's good to have 2 sons off to Europe this summer.