War sacrifices aren’t always on battlefields

Not me.

No, I’m not one of the millions of Americans who this weekend will haul out the barbecue grill or slather on sunscreen to welcome in summer on this long Memorial Day Weekend.

Of course, I’ll do fun things with family and friends when invited, but I won’t neglect the quiet times to reflect on this country’s war dead. With my own family story – my Dad died on a silent battlefield in the Cold War – how could I do otherwise?

With the dozens upon dozens of interviews I’ve had throughout my journalism career with veterans and those who lost loved ones to war, how could I do otherwise?

I mean this as no treatise on war, for sadly we humans have warred since the beginning of our time.

The U.S. has survived five declared wars and numerous undeclared ones such as Korea, Vietnam and Iraq. With so much fighting, millions of war veterans have survived to share their stories or to remain silent about their life-altering experiences. Their official day of honor is Nov. 11, Veterans Day.

Are you familiar with the ones in your family who served? In mine, the list of those wearing wartime uniforms include a grandfather, nine uncles and my own parents, mostly in World War I and WWII. All survived the bullets and bombs.

Inevitably, war also kills and that’s why we observe a Memorial Day every year. The official day is the last Monday of May, but in my heart it will always be the 30th. That’s the date it was from the mid-19th Century until our U.S. Congress changed it into a three-day holiday.

Something about turning that same-date Memorial Day into a movable holiday weekend somehow lessens its significance.

I admit I’m jaded in that statement because the first portion of my life was spent in a military family stationed hither and yonder, but always marking Memorial Day with sad and heroic remembrances, putting flags on graves, wearing red poppies and watching a parade. Oh, that patriotic music!

The U.S. origins of commemorating our war dead, however, are muddled. At least 15 communities from both the North and South claim early Memorial Day origins linked to the Civil War.

These assorted “Decoration Days” morphed into a widespread May 30th “Memorial Day” after numerous U.S. cities and states made the observation official. It eventually came to include all American military who died while serving this country, from the Revolutionary War forward.

When Congress established a uniform federal Monday holidays act in 1971, Memorial Day was cemented into place as the last Monday in May.

My father was already a war casualty by 1971, but that wasn’t public knowledge because the military work that claimed his life was top secret. People were told he died of cancer and the fact that it was caused by exposure to Cold War nuclear radiation as a Naval special weapons office was hush-hush.

Lt. Cmdr. Roy L. Bergeron died two months before JFK’s assassination, so this was a tragic era for both family and nation. The undeclared Cold War that had begun in 1947 and lasted until the Berlin Wall collapse was an ideological and geopolitical conflict between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. My generation learned “duck and cover” drills while adults contemplated building bomb shelters.

My mother’s attempts to get Uncle Sam to acknowledge the why of his death and his real military duties mostly drew blanks. Dad had adhered to the top secret ethics code and until his illness she didn’t even know he worked with atomic weapons. After his death, she needed proof so their four children would receive war orphan benefits, for which she finally got approval but with little explanation.

Later I would learn why. The Navy had burned his top secret records within months of death. I only know this because I found a small slip of paper buried among his “regular” Navy papers that was the official notification of incineration.

In 2013, once I’d retired from the newsroom with time on my hands, I put on my reporter’s cap and began asking questions, filling out Freedom of Information forms and requesting what did remain of Naval records.

After two years I had a stack of 700 papers, but nothing with definitive proof he was an atomic vet.

Happily, I did learn much about Dad, from his WWII duties to his personality and achievements cited in fitness, duty and commendation reports. The research enriched my understanding of a brainy, but poor, Louisiana Cajun who’d joined the Navy as a sailor at 17, was stationed at Pearl Harbor when the Japanese bombed and was among the first post-war appointees to Officer Candidate School

When we heard about the little-advertised Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, or RECA, my sisters and I applied, hoping my research would uncover proof of his secret life. I worked closely with a Department of Justice attorney, passing along dates I discovered when he was at possible atomic testing sites or in White Sands and Los Alamos, New Mexico, the heart of Cold War atomic secret stuff.

DOJ crosschecked my dates with classified information, and still the RECA rejection letters came. I wrote a report of my older sister’s memory of when Dad described to her what it was like to witness an atomic test. Memories aren’t proof, at least not proof enough.

When going through that paper stack for the umpteenth time, a little light bulb went off in my head when I reread a document from the judge advocate general who’d ruled Dad’s illness as “100 percent service connected.” That light bulb: If they destroyed my father’s records would they also have destroyed all the JAG records?

I never got the question answered but the RECA application was finally approved. I called my DOJ contact to ask if she could tell which of the documents finally connected the dots. “No.”

Oh, that our mother could have lived to experience the official acknowledgment that Roy Bergeron was a casualty of war, more so than cancer.

My Dad, who taught me at a young age to Live! with an exclamation point, wouldn’t want any of us to be maudlin on the day that memorializes the military dead, which number about 1.2 million throughout U.S. history. Before dying, he told our mother that he’d sacrifice his life all over again.

Truthfully, I would rather a peaceful world than such continued sacrifices. Every Memorial Day when I see photos of old and new military headstones in neat rows, I am drawn to the story of Willie McBride and re-listen to Australian songwriter/singer Eric Bogle and his “Green Fields of France.”

Although the song historically is about WWI, Willie McBride might well be the Universal Solider. I end with a few lines from the Bogle classic:

“Well, how’d you do, Sergeant Willie McBride?

“Do you mind if I sit down here by your graveside....

“Do all those who lie here know why they died?

“Did you really believe them when they told you the cause?

“Did you really believe them that the war would end war?

“But the suffering, the sorrow, the glory, the shame,

“The killing, the dying — it was all done in vain.

“For Willie McBride, it’s all happened again,

“And again, and again, and again and again.”

Kat Bergeron, an award-winning veteran reporter and feature writer who specializes in Gulf Coast history and sense of place, is retired from the Sun Herald. She writes this Gulf Coast Chronicles column as a freelance correspondent. Reach her at:

BergeronKat@gmail.com

Or, at Southern Possum Tales, P.O. Box 33, Barboursville, VA 22923