July 04, 2006
Somebody Always Pays For Freedom
Purple Heart earned by Alan du Bois, with a background of some of his V-mail to his beloved wife Marjorie. (Designed and photographed by Catherine King.)
by Jerome du Bois
I sometimes wonder about my father's reasons for going off to fight in World War Two. He didn't have to, and it took him almost two years of trying before he could put on his Marine uniform, when he was thirty years old.
Maybe it was because he was on Oahu on Pearl Harbor Day --he saw the Zeros flying over the golf course-- and felt the threat more immediately than someone in, say, Omaha. He had just started a family and a career, and everyone in Hawai'i feared an imminent Japanese invasion of the Islands. Even when that fear went unrealized, and his family was safe on the mainland, he tried to join.
Maybe it was because he grew up in the aftermath of World War One, when the American proverb, "Freedom is never free," had been tested the third time. The du Bois family had fought in the Revolution and for the Union in the Civil War as well.
David Hackett Fischer, in his book Liberty and Freedom: A Visual History of America's Founding Ideas, summarizes the attitude after Pearl Harbor:
Before December 7, 1941, many Americans believed that their freedom was safe and secure in the New World, far from the tyrannies of Asia and Europe. After the Japanese attack, American attitudes were never the same again. A determined enemy, deeply hostile to a free society, had projected his power across the widest ocean in the world and struck a heavy blow without warning. The lesson was very clear. Friends of liberty and freedom must always be alert, and stronger than their enemies.
At any rate, he went to fight in the Pacific Theater. He put himself into the line of fire so often, and so deeply into the mouth of Hell, that he earned five Purple Hearts for his wounds, and two Silver Stars and a Bronze Star for his bravery. And for the rest of his life he suffered from migraines, spinal pain, and the aftereffects of malaria.
But he never let the horrors he had to witness get in the way of his determination to succeed, his rather coarse sense of humor, his enjoyment of life. He had good reasons to celebrate his freedom. He paid for it.
Posted by Jerome at July 4, 2006 07:07 AM | TrackBack