The day I first saw my dad cry

I remember the first time I ever saw my dad cry.

Dad was of a different generation, one that strongly believed a man kept his feelings bottled up inside him.

So I was 18, and a high school graduate, before I saw my dad shed a tear.

It wasn’t a funeral, or a wedding, or when he was worried about one of us six kids.

It was the bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut on Oct. 23, 1983.

Nearly 300 servicemen died, including 220 Marines, 18 Navy personnel and three Army soldiers, as well as 58 French paratroopers.

We were at St. John’s Regional Medical Center, visiting a hospitalized relative, and saw news accounts of the bombing on television. I glanced over at Dad to see a tear stream down his face. Then another. Then another.

Dad was a U.S. Marine, serving from 1940 to 1946. During World War II, he spent most of his time in the Pacific Theater. As a member of the First Marine Division, he was part of the forces that landed on Okinawa.

Doubtless, my dad and thousands of other Marines and GIs there saw things they likely never forgot.

Every soldier, sailor and Marine is different, it seems. Some talk openly about their experiences. Some, like my dad, kept it bottled up. It was only in the last couple of years of my dad’s life that I learned some of the things he’d seen, and only because Alzheimer’s had loosened his reserve, had brought down his guard.

My dad was 45 when I was born — about 20 years or so older than many of my friends’ fathers. He was 62 when I graduated high school, 63 when I saw him cry for the first time.

I couldn’t envision my dad as a 20-year-old recruit from the Cookson Hills of Oklahoma, aware that something big was brewing on the world scene but not really knowing what it was. He was likely naïve and assuming that the war would be limited to Europe and would be over within a few months.

And I couldn’t fathom that by the time Okinawa happened, my dad would have likely been one of the “old men” of his platoon, at the age of 24. In fact, I still have a hard time wrapping my mind around how young these guys were. Like Vietnam after them, it seems like the average age of an American GI was somewhere around 19 or 20.

I could shed tears for the lost youth of my dad and millions of soldiers like him.

But I won’t.

Instead, I shed tears of joy because when their country called, they rushed forward to serve. The words “all gave some and some gave all,” take on new meaning as I grow older and, hopefully, wiser.

Yes, as a member of the tail end of the Baby Boomer generation — or the top of Generation X, depending on how you measure the generations — I cry more often than my dad did.

If you see tears in my eyes today, they’re tears of gratitude. I’m thankful these men and women gave so much to ensure my freedom. I’m grateful to the members of the “greatest generation” for essentially saving the world during World War II. I’m thankful for the men and women who have served since then in wars and conflicts spanning the globe from Korea to Vietnam to that Marine Corps barracks in Beirut to Grenada to Panama to Kosovo to Iraq and Afghanistan.

My dad never liked to be called a hero, despite the fact he earned a Purple Heart and two Bronze Stars during his six-year military career. He always told me the heroes were the guys left over there, the ones who didn’t make it back.

Not to contradict my dad, but all veterans are all heroes in my book. To the ones here with us today, the ones no longer with us, and the ones who never made it back home, I offer my sincere and heartfelt thanks.

John Ford is managing editor of the Neosho Daily News.