Pearl Harbor Day 1982, Hope for the Holidays

I left Vietnam in July 1971 and the Army in January 1973. For the next few years I lived in San Pedro and Long Beach, California; Rochester, New York; and Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina before settling in Virginia Beach, Virginia. Somewhere in the middle of all that moving around I got married and by 1982 I was the father of two girls. I had done a little writing while living in California but not that much and I had reflected back on Vietnam even less. But by 1982 I was ready to take look back  , not just on Vietnam but also on just about everything else.

 

Hope For the Holidays

                     --a GI remembers

                           Virginian Pilot, Tuesday, December 7, 1982

In December 1970, I was nearing the end of my first year in the army. It was a strange year. I held none of the then-popular objections to serving in the army. Both my parents had served their country during World War II and I was proud to be following in their footsteps.

But there was one problem. I didn’t really feel that I was walking the same path that they had. So many changes had taken place and the army had come under so much attack in recent years that it was hard to believe that my army was my father’s army. His had had the support of the entire nation. Mine didn’t even have the support of its own members. After one year I was still looking for the missing link.

But as the year was drawing to a close it was the upcoming Bob Hope Christmas Show that occupied my thoughts more than anything else as the 12 days of Christmas passed so tediously slow.

I was an information specialist assigned to the 1^st Aviation Brigade. We’d be in charge of taking the official pictures of the show—Hope, the girls, the celebrities, the girls—did I mention the girls.