Memorial Day tale of two very different generations

I received an email recently from a World War II Navy veteran who served in the Pacific. He was a shipmate of my father's and, like my dad, he saw plenty of combat up-close and personal, including multiple kamikaze attacks on his ship at Okinawa.

My sailor friend remains a spry and thoughtful 92 years young and is a man who can and does still fit in his 70-plus-year-old uniform. He wears it proudly on each Memorial Day and Veterans Day and sometimes to elementary schools to talk about World War II. The children often ask about the stripes on his sleeve and he proudly tells them he was a signalman first class.

He attached to his email a short video with a brief message: "Too many Americans alive today don't realize just what those who came before contributed to our freedom."

I watched the video. and it was very moving (see http://loyceedeen.webstarts.com/uploads/GoingHome.mp4 ). It lasts just about 100 seconds and has rattled around in my brain since then. With Memorial Day just a few days away, it has caused me to set pen to paper.

It was scratchy black-and-white film - the kind that any history buff has seen on the History Channel or, for those of us old enough to remember, a scene covered often in the very popular television series Victory at Sea.

The scene was of a ship's crew gathered for a burial at sea for a sailor killed in action. However, this was not the usual ceremony because the sailor was actually buried at sea in his airplane.

Aviation Machinist Mate 2nd Class Loyce Edward Deen was a gunner on a two-man TBM Avenger torpedo bomber. On Nov. 5, 1944, his aircraft was attacking a Japanese cruiser when the plane was hit by anti-aircraft fire. Deen was killed. The pilot survived and was able to bring the badly damaged aircraft back aboard the aircraft carrier USS Essex.

The plane had been shot up so badly that it was decided to leave Deen in his aircraft and bury him at sea in it. The crew was assembled and, after a brief ceremony and the playing of "Taps," Deen and his aircraft were pushed over the side and sank slowly beneath the waves.

To the best of my knowledge, this is the only time in U.S. Navy history that an aviator was formally buried in his aircraft after being killed in action.

Seeing this video made me once again realize just how fortunate we 21st-century Americans have been and how little we recognize that reality. We are the beneficiaries of Deen's courage and his sacrifice. Together with millions of his fellow veterans, living and dead, he helped to keep our nation free.

In sad contrast to Deen and to those valiant Americans of the aptly named Greatest Generation, most baby boomers, Gen Xers and the millennials see public service, especially military service, as something to be avoided at all costs.

These Americans, the "not so great" generation, have certainly lived in uncertain times. There were long decades of the Cold War with the Korean War and the Cuban Missile crisis as particularly vivid episodes. The Vietnam War came into most American lives via the television screen. Our nation witnessed the emergence of radical Islamic terrorism culminating in the vicious attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 9/11, and we then endured the steady drag of 15-plus years of war in Afghanistan and Iraq. More recently, Americans and the world have watched the horrors of civil war and genocide in Syria, terror attacks in Europe, and the ballistic missile launches of that crazy leader in North Korea.

The operative word here is watched. Unlike the Greatest Generation, the lives of the vast majority of Americans in the post-World War II era have remained largely untouched by these conflicts. People have gone about their lives enjoying their cars, their $6 coffees, their cell phones, and their very pampered existence. All the while, less than 1 percent of Americans have volunteered for military service.

Those special few Americans stepped up in the same fashion as those of the Greatest Generation. In doing so, they paid a price in interrupted lives or even much worse. While those in uniform worried about being ambushed in a rice paddy in Vietnam or engaging in house-to-house combat in Iraq or waiting for that next improvised explosive device to go off in Afghanistan, many Americans here at home were fretting about which movie to see or which bar or club to go to, or in today's crazy world, seeking safe spaces on their university campuses to avoid the hardship of possibly hearing ideas they might not like.

This Memorial Day, let us all take some time to think about Aviation Machinist Mate 2nd Class Loyce Edward Deen and his family. They and millions like them paid a terrible price for the freedoms we all enjoy. In taking the time to remember those who have sacrificed so much for us, perhaps we can come just a little bit closer to understanding and embracing the ideals of the Greatest Generation.

Christopher Lehman served in the U.S. Navy 1969-1971 and later served as special assistant for national security affairs to President Ronald Reagan. He has two sons who are Marines. clehman48@aol.com