Maybe we’re better than we think we are.
Here’s a question you’re advised never to ask at a dinner party, unless those present are beloved family, close friends, or you have no desire to be with any of them from now on. The question: On what day in America were the most lies told? That sounds inexcusably stupid, asinine, impossible to ascertain – a joke still-born.
Actually, it’s a valid question with a solid answer bristling with sharp implications for here and now. The date the most lies were told in America was Dec. 8, 1941. On that date – the day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor – the young men of America dashed pell-mell to join the military. All over America there were lines snaking around the block, sometimes three or four times, around recruitment centers for the Army, the Navy, the Marines and the Coast Guard. There was no independent Air Force at the time. There was instead the Army Air Corps.
In order to enlist you had to be at least 18 years old. So tens of thousands of young men lied about their age to get into uniform. They pretended to be 18, even though they were really only 17. Additional thousands of those young men were only 16. A book was written in the 1960s about one young American who succeeded in persuading the recruiters he was 18, but turned out to be only 12! He managed to get into the Navy, and, in the midst of a ferocious shootout with the Japanese, an order was received to throw that brave young sailor in the brig. The publication of that book led to another boy who had enlisted at only 11 years of age! The trail ends there.
There was an organization formed to defend the interests of underage servicemen. They had been denied all of their veterans’ benefits because, instead of being regarded as precocious patriots, those young men who were not yet 18 were regarded as liars. Many thousands of those “liars” lied with the help of their parents!
Our point here is, the day after Pearl Harbor millions of Americans rushed to enlist. There was a huge spike in enlistments. On the day after 9/11, however, there was a huge spike in talking about enlisting, but almost no upward movement of the enlistment needle at all!
This naturally worried America’s leaders, who had every reason to wonder if America was fit to fight, mentally as well as physically. Certainly the patriotism of 1941 has long since been uprooted, ridiculed and replaced with Americans hating America just as many millions around the world have long hated America. Obviously, we haven’t hit bottom because we have an all-volunteer military that causes very little public worry as to whether or not we have sufficient force for whatever challenges might arise.
I feel that question has my name on it, because I have wondered since the beginning of World War II how America would fare in a full-fledged war. Would we fold like the French, join the invaders like the Croatians, or make the invaders sorry they’d ever set one big toe into American territory, like the Yugoslavs? Yugoslavia was the crown jewel of anti-Nazi resistance. By the time the Allies had broken through, fully two-thirds of Yugoslavia was in Yugoslav hands. I’ve wondered constantly how America would perform if war were to come to our home soil.
Out of the tragedy of Hurricane Harvey comes a robust ray of hope. The “Cajun Navy” has been treated as a sort of lighthearted sidebar to the rest of the picture. President Trump ought to call Sally Jenkins of the Washington Post and thank her for covering the “invasion” of east Texas by these outdoorsmen-heroes who loaded their aluminum boats onto their cars and trucks and trailers and sped to Houston to rescue strangers, as many strangers as they possibly could. And they knew how to handle those waters from a lifetime of chasing crab and other delicacies through the bayous. The boat of one volunteer in the Cajun Navy, 21-year-old Buster Stoker, could hold only seven people. But he overloaded his craft and even took on some water, but he rescued a hundred or more on his first mission out!
Japanese Adm. Yamamoto knew the American people, and he warned his warmongering superiors that America was a sleeping giant. The Japanese high command looked upon Americans as fun-loving. Yamamoto knew that “molested” Americans could also be hard fighters. And the admiral learned that merely by attending Harvard!
The “Don’t Mess With America” spirit can come across pretty emphatically after four years at Harvard.
Or maybe four hours with America’s Cajun Navy!
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