My son, Michael T Lesniak (1982-2017) joined the Army (101st Airborne) relatively late at age 26. Became an expert marksman, so good that he was sent over to Afghanistan on a “special assignment”. He came back as a broken person. It was the beginning of a long, slow suicide. One day near Thanksgiving, he was so full of “stuff” that he laid down for a nap and never woke up. He wasn’t a “glorious” casualty but he was one nonetheless. It took your short column, Lucian, to make me realize that he should be honored and remembered today as well. He will be from this Memorial Day forward.
Brilliant lyrics, that song, and war has produced some astounding literature --- but of course none of the writers would hesitate for a leptosecond to consign all of that to a funeral pyre rather than have the godawful wars to bring it into being.
My uncle, Lt. Leonard Green, was killed in Italy in WWII before I was born. Though I never knew him, he was always a presence in our family. Always loved. Never forgotten.
My mother's younger brother, Thomas Jefferson Lane, Jr., died the most way people die in war, not in some heroic action, but because he was somewhere at a bad time. His Army Engineer battalion was on a ship headed for Normandy in June of 1944 when, according to his surviving comrades, he went forward to get coffee. This put him right where the ship struck a mine. I was born in 1946, so never knew him. I read a letter of his from when he was in England awaiting the invasion. Although he had no education beyond high school, his writing was, in my view, worthy of publication in the New Yorker.
Lets remember the more recent vets: Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq…who got no parades when they got home. These men and women volunteered to serve, and way too many came home to addiction, alcoholism, depression, PTSD of all kinds. We don’t do nearly enough for their mental health needs. Shout out to my late dad, served in the 4th Armored division in WW II, who like many of our dads, came home proud of his service but just wanted to live a quiet life, which he did until he died in 2020 at 96.
My father was squadron commander in the South Pacific. Led many missions, drew up crew assignments for all missions. Low level strafing with six s 50 cal mounted where bombardier should have been. High loss rates and that was what got him. He never got over it. Neither did my brother nor I because he was a raging troubled drunk.. And I can see signs of it in my nephews now. So a shadow over three generations.
Thanks Lucian. My father Edward Hart joined the Army in 1942, just as I was being born. I will never know if this was a patriotic gesture or designed to do what his buddies were doing. Being Jewish I’m sure the goal of saving the world from Hitler was an incentive. I believe he was proud of his service as an infantryman, later a Sargent, and a decorated soldier. Among my earliest memories was The D Day Parade on Fifth Avenue where I was held up by my Mother as the troops marched by. I think I can still hear the cheers and feel the excitement. I believe my Father never truly recovered from his wartime experience in Germany and France. He never ever spoke of it and you could not coax him into it. Instead he had stories about his buddies and assorted capers and the crazy stuff. He would laugh with tears filled his eyes. I did not think he was crying then but Looking back on these rare moments I believe he wasn’t strictly laughing. Throughout his life he would tear up at the Star Spangled Banner.
My father, a Jewish immigrant from Poland, saw that “Uncle Sam Wants You” poster and joined the Army. He wanted so badly to be sent back to Europe to fight the Nazis but he was sent to the Pacific Theater to fight the Japanese. He became a Staff Sergeant and a helluva poker player. Never spoke about his time in the service.
The poker games seem to be an ongoing theme for soldiers trying to escape the sheer madness of war, alternating with boredom.
My grandfather had essentially two anecdotes about his entire time in World War 1, "The War to End All Wars." One was about the regular company poker game where the cook ended up with everyone's money; the other made a large impression on me:
From studies at Ohio State in 1917, to floating in a balloon as an aerial observer, my grandfather T.R. Turnbull was tasked with spotting German movements over the trenches. At one point in the course of this, he found himself looking through binoculars at a German youth about his own age, also in a balloon, also looking at him through binoculars.
He wondered if the "enemy soldier" had any more understanding of what the war was really about than he did!
Cf. The similar refelctions, but far more scathing, and in the tone of a psychologically scarred romantic idealist, sprinkled through Celine's writings, about going from his innocent, harmless, pre-1914 contacts with German youths involved with play, flirtations with girls, and some beer drinking, to trying to kill each other --- despite having absolutely no possible reason for hating any of these people, "the enemy"!
N.B. Celine ended up with horrifically reactionary politics (he went so far as to support the Vichy and wrote some anti-Semitic screeds, inter alia) while also being one of the most influential and stunningly honest and funny writers imaginable.
I recently heard a quote, attributed to the anthropologist Margaret Mead, I believe. It was something like: "War has not always existed. It is a human construct. What people do, they can undo. We need to undo, ['unmake'], war." Let us do so.
That said, I - and I hope I speak for the many of us who read your excellent posts - want to thank you for your service. It continues. After all, journalism is a service as well, is it not?
My uncle fought in the Korean War, Army. A Yale graduate, the war changed him greatly. He hanged himself 3 years after the war ended. As with your family, LTIV, never the same.
My uncle graduated from Staunton Military Academy, "went across France with General Patch " in 1944-45, and ended up debriefing scared young German kids in their teens because he spoke excellent German. He would have been scheduled for Operations Olympic and Coronet, the invasion planned for the home islands of the Imperial Japanese Empire, its "Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere" degenerated in the summer of 1945 into millions of square miles of occupied territory in Asia and the Pacific, with approximately 100,000 starving to death per month, many thousands regularly executed for resisting the occupying Japanese, a real ongoing nightmare with Saipan and Okinawa having some of the bloodiest combat of the war, ended by the horrific but brutally effective atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
My father was in his last year at SMA, and who knows, might have been killed had the war dragged on into 1946, and then, well, clearly I would not be alive writing this.
My father and grandfather almost never spoke. Everything they said to me would fill two sheets of paper. They both served and they bost lost brothers. I and II
Thank you Lucian. I know the pain that goes with this. Thank goodness we have and have had men like them. Lets hope (although in this world it doesn’t look like it!) that it wont be necessary again
My father lived in rural Appalachian Tennessee. No running water, no electricity. He enlisted in the Marines at 15 1/2 at the start of WWII.
He retired from the Corps as a Lt. Col. in 1974. He gave everything he had for the nation.
We honor your veteran family members Lucian and we honor you as well for your courageous reporting. Thanks and respect to the Truscotts.
My son, Michael T Lesniak (1982-2017) joined the Army (101st Airborne) relatively late at age 26. Became an expert marksman, so good that he was sent over to Afghanistan on a “special assignment”. He came back as a broken person. It was the beginning of a long, slow suicide. One day near Thanksgiving, he was so full of “stuff” that he laid down for a nap and never woke up. He wasn’t a “glorious” casualty but he was one nonetheless. It took your short column, Lucian, to make me realize that he should be honored and remembered today as well. He will be from this Memorial Day forward.
I’m so sorry. This is so sad. When one life is shattered, an entire family suffers.
So so sorry May his memory be a blessing
Michael, we honor him, nonetheless. He fought an internal war after battling an external one. Bless you and your family.
war - what is it good for? absolutely nothing
Brilliant lyrics, that song, and war has produced some astounding literature --- but of course none of the writers would hesitate for a leptosecond to consign all of that to a funeral pyre rather than have the godawful wars to bring it into being.
My uncle, Lt. Leonard Green, was killed in Italy in WWII before I was born. Though I never knew him, he was always a presence in our family. Always loved. Never forgotten.
My mother's younger brother, Thomas Jefferson Lane, Jr., died the most way people die in war, not in some heroic action, but because he was somewhere at a bad time. His Army Engineer battalion was on a ship headed for Normandy in June of 1944 when, according to his surviving comrades, he went forward to get coffee. This put him right where the ship struck a mine. I was born in 1946, so never knew him. I read a letter of his from when he was in England awaiting the invasion. Although he had no education beyond high school, his writing was, in my view, worthy of publication in the New Yorker.
Mom was a Woman Marine, WWII, Dad served WWII, returned to service in 1946. Retired in 1977.
As a brat and a former officer I worry about this country's future. Not enough vets in Washington to rein in the morons infected by Trumpism.
Lets remember the more recent vets: Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq…who got no parades when they got home. These men and women volunteered to serve, and way too many came home to addiction, alcoholism, depression, PTSD of all kinds. We don’t do nearly enough for their mental health needs. Shout out to my late dad, served in the 4th Armored division in WW II, who like many of our dads, came home proud of his service but just wanted to live a quiet life, which he did until he died in 2020 at 96.
My father was squadron commander in the South Pacific. Led many missions, drew up crew assignments for all missions. Low level strafing with six s 50 cal mounted where bombardier should have been. High loss rates and that was what got him. He never got over it. Neither did my brother nor I because he was a raging troubled drunk.. And I can see signs of it in my nephews now. So a shadow over three generations.
Thanks Lucian. My father Edward Hart joined the Army in 1942, just as I was being born. I will never know if this was a patriotic gesture or designed to do what his buddies were doing. Being Jewish I’m sure the goal of saving the world from Hitler was an incentive. I believe he was proud of his service as an infantryman, later a Sargent, and a decorated soldier. Among my earliest memories was The D Day Parade on Fifth Avenue where I was held up by my Mother as the troops marched by. I think I can still hear the cheers and feel the excitement. I believe my Father never truly recovered from his wartime experience in Germany and France. He never ever spoke of it and you could not coax him into it. Instead he had stories about his buddies and assorted capers and the crazy stuff. He would laugh with tears filled his eyes. I did not think he was crying then but Looking back on these rare moments I believe he wasn’t strictly laughing. Throughout his life he would tear up at the Star Spangled Banner.
My father, a Jewish immigrant from Poland, saw that “Uncle Sam Wants You” poster and joined the Army. He wanted so badly to be sent back to Europe to fight the Nazis but he was sent to the Pacific Theater to fight the Japanese. He became a Staff Sergeant and a helluva poker player. Never spoke about his time in the service.
The poker games seem to be an ongoing theme for soldiers trying to escape the sheer madness of war, alternating with boredom.
My grandfather had essentially two anecdotes about his entire time in World War 1, "The War to End All Wars." One was about the regular company poker game where the cook ended up with everyone's money; the other made a large impression on me:
From studies at Ohio State in 1917, to floating in a balloon as an aerial observer, my grandfather T.R. Turnbull was tasked with spotting German movements over the trenches. At one point in the course of this, he found himself looking through binoculars at a German youth about his own age, also in a balloon, also looking at him through binoculars.
He wondered if the "enemy soldier" had any more understanding of what the war was really about than he did!
Cf. The similar refelctions, but far more scathing, and in the tone of a psychologically scarred romantic idealist, sprinkled through Celine's writings, about going from his innocent, harmless, pre-1914 contacts with German youths involved with play, flirtations with girls, and some beer drinking, to trying to kill each other --- despite having absolutely no possible reason for hating any of these people, "the enemy"!
N.B. Celine ended up with horrifically reactionary politics (he went so far as to support the Vichy and wrote some anti-Semitic screeds, inter alia) while also being one of the most influential and stunningly honest and funny writers imaginable.
Strong as always Lucian, many thanks!
I recently heard a quote, attributed to the anthropologist Margaret Mead, I believe. It was something like: "War has not always existed. It is a human construct. What people do, they can undo. We need to undo, ['unmake'], war." Let us do so.
That said, I - and I hope I speak for the many of us who read your excellent posts - want to thank you for your service. It continues. After all, journalism is a service as well, is it not?
You could view The Iliad as carefully wrought journalism!
My uncle fought in the Korean War, Army. A Yale graduate, the war changed him greatly. He hanged himself 3 years after the war ended. As with your family, LTIV, never the same.
My uncle graduated from Staunton Military Academy, "went across France with General Patch " in 1944-45, and ended up debriefing scared young German kids in their teens because he spoke excellent German. He would have been scheduled for Operations Olympic and Coronet, the invasion planned for the home islands of the Imperial Japanese Empire, its "Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere" degenerated in the summer of 1945 into millions of square miles of occupied territory in Asia and the Pacific, with approximately 100,000 starving to death per month, many thousands regularly executed for resisting the occupying Japanese, a real ongoing nightmare with Saipan and Okinawa having some of the bloodiest combat of the war, ended by the horrific but brutally effective atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
My father was in his last year at SMA, and who knows, might have been killed had the war dragged on into 1946, and then, well, clearly I would not be alive writing this.
"Blessed are the peacemakers...'
My father and grandfather almost never spoke. Everything they said to me would fill two sheets of paper. They both served and they bost lost brothers. I and II
Thank you for the sacrifices you and your family have made in service to our country.
Thank you. Thank you to your family
Thank you Lucian. I know the pain that goes with this. Thank goodness we have and have had men like them. Lets hope (although in this world it doesn’t look like it!) that it wont be necessary again