The High Cost of Defending Democracy

HARD LESSONS ABOUT THE HIGH COST OF PRESERVING DEMOCRACY -

NOT EASY FOR A VETERAN'S FAMILY TO WATCH IT COMPROMISED, AGAIN AND AGAIN

     MY FATHER ED, GOD REST HIS SOUL, NEVER SPOKE TO ME ABOUT THE REASON HE ENLISTED IN THE NAVY, DURING THE EARLY GOING OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR.

     BUT MY MOTHER DID. IT WAS A MEMORABLE DISCUSSION, WHILE ED WAS ON A BUSINESS TRIP TO TORONTO. ACTUALLY, IT WAS A SHORT TIME BEFORE MERLE WOULD SUFFER A LIFE THREATENING BOWEL OBSTRUCTION, A STROKE AND A HEART ATTACK, ALL ON THE OPERATING TABLE WITHIN ONE HOUR OF CLIMBING ABOARD. IT WAS PROVIDENTIAL, I SUPPOSE, BECAUSE AFTER THIS, POOR OLD MERLE HAD LOST MOST OF HER LIFE MEMORIES, AND CONVERSATIONS WERE SHORT BUT STILL SWEET.

     I WAS IN MY FIFTIES. SHE WAS IN HER 80'S. THAT'S A LONG TIME TO WAIT, TO BE TOLD THE TRUTH, CONSIDERING SHE COULD HAVE HAD THIS SAME CONVERSATION WITH ME WHEN I WAS FIFTEEN OR TWENTY-TWO, OR MAYBE EVEN AT THIRTY-FIVE. I GUESS SHE FINALLY FIGURED THAT AT FIFTY-THREE, I COULD HANDLE THE PERSONAL INFORMATION. ED, YOU SEE, DIDN'T THINK I NEEDED TO KNOW. I WAS ALWAYS A FLAG WAVING, DEMOCRACY OBSESSED YOUNG LAD, AND HE KNEW I HAD AN EMBELLISHED OVERVIEW OF HIS SERVICE FOR HOME AND COUNTRY……AND THE COMMONWEALTH OF COURSE. I HAD PIECED TOGETHER SOME INCONSISTENCIES WITH THE ENLISTMENT STORY, AFTER HEARING BITS AND PIECES OF CONVERSATIONS, WHEN FRIENDS CAME OVER AND THE TOPIC TURNED TO WAR SERVICE.

     IT'S NOT THAT MY FATHER HAD BEEN IN TROUBLE WITH THE LAW OR ANYTHING, AND IF HE HAD, MAYBE HE WOULD HAVE JOINED THE FRENCH FOREIGN LEGION INSTEAD….WHERE IT IS SAID YOU COULD LOSE YOUR IDENTITY……AND EXCESS BAGGAGE. AS I HAD BEEN TAUGHT IN SCHOOL AND IN CANADIAN CIVILIAN LIFE GENERALLY, OUR ENLISTED MEN JOINED THE WAR EFFORT TO PRESERVE DEMOCRACY, AND THE FREEDOM WE ENJOY TODAY. "FOR THE LOVE OF CANADA," I MAY HAVE HEADLINED AN ESSAY ON MY DAD'S STINT IN THE ROYAL CANADIAN NAVY. I SUPPOSE NOW, MERLE MAY HAVE FELT I WOULD HAVE LOOKED ON MY FATHER DIFFERENTLY HAD I KNOWN THE TRUTH. THE REAL INCENTIVE HE HAD TO ENLIST.

     SHE EXPLAINED HOW ED ENLISTED WITH A FEW OF HIS CHILDHOOD FRIENDS, ONE DAY WHEN THE MOOD STRUCK, THAT ADVENTURE AWAITED OUT THERE IN THE BIG WIDE WORLD. THEY WERE FOLLOWING HUNDREDS OF OTHER YOUNG ADULTS, CAUGHT UP IN THE FERVOR, TO KICK HITLER'S ASS OUT OF EUROPE. YET ACCORDING TO MY MOTHER, AND SHE HAD NO REASON TO LIE, ED ENLISTED BECAUSE HE WAS JOBLESS, BROKE AND HUNGRY. ED WAS A SKINNY WRETCH OF A MAN, THEN TURNING EIGHTEEN. HE HAD BEEN A MAN BY RESPONSIBILITY FOR MANY YEARS BEFORE THAT, WHEN HIS FATHER ABANDONED HIM AND HIS THREE BROTHERS, AND A WIFE AND MOTHER, WHO SUFFERED FROM SERIOUS BOUTS OF DEPRESSION. AND WHO WASN'T ADVERSE WHATSOEVER, TO JUST DISAPPEARING WHEN THE MOOD STRUCK. IT STRUCK OFTEN.

A SURVIVOR IN MANY WAYS; BUT A LOVER OF DEMOCRACY UNTIL THE END

     Ed (Ted) was a survivor of Toronto "The Good," that wasn't so kind much of the time. The son of an Irishman, he had a notoriously bad temper, and I suppose the navy thought that was okay as a characteristic. He'd box bare fisted, and he used to show me as a kid, how he'd damaged his knuckles in impromptu boxing matches on the streets, and on ship when the mood or circumstance struck. His nose looked as if it belonged in a boxing museum. He was a thin, underweight tempest in a teapot. So I wanted to believe he joined the navy like Popeye, to protect the good from the clutches of evil. I used to tell my chums that Ed was the model for Popeye. I was proud of my father, and like many of us war-obsessed lads, (who read everything we could about the great battles), we had these images of our kin that were based largely on the fiction we borrowed from either Hollywood or comic books.

     "Your dad, and so many of the other mates he knew from Cabbagetown, were in the same position. Times were hard. The jobs were part time, and low paying, and it seemed to Ed as if he would be stuck in poverty his whole life," she said. "He saw the navy as a way to save himself…..by putting himself in harm's way. It's ironic, but that is why he enlisted. To save himself from the mean streets, where there wasn't much hope of getting out otherwise. He liked Toronto, but as he had grown up impoverished, he could see that it also was closing in on the rest of his life. He decided, with a lot of other fellows…..all nice kids, to join this great adventure. Quite a few of those naive kids didn't come back. They signed up you see, to save themselves, but died instead."

     Ed had been in and out of orphanages throughout his childhood, and he had been sexually molested by those who claimed to be his guardians, whether at summer camps for the poor, or in foster care, which he dreaded, mostly for his younger brothers that he couldn't always defend. The youngest boy had been so badly mistreated, he was institutionalized as insane, in his early teens; and was only released for the last two years of his life……which was probably at about 70 years of age. Some today might, under their breath, have labelled my father as "damaged goods," with too much trauma to rehabilitate. The navy didn't worry too much about enlisting an angry young man, as it might be helpful fighting the German war machine. It's true. Ed felt he had nothing to lose, as so much had been taken from him. So as far as death-defying courage, his was just day to day temperament, trying then to survive what he had endured as a child, being abandoned by his father, then his mother…..left to fend for his brothers, abandoned while they played ball in the park. No, he didn't enlist to fight for the preservation of democracy. He joined, like a lot of Canadian youth, because they were desperate to improve their lives…..and funny thing that…..they chose a war to make that happen.

     Merle would add to this, that the war was a good thing for Ed, because it pre-occupied him with other things……life threatening work, for one. She said he let his inner rage out, when he was manning the "twin oerlikon" anti-aircraft guns, trying to take German aircraft out of the sky. I don't know how many "kills" he had, because he would never talk about it……didn't want to dredge up a life he wished to leave behind. I often wonder when he'd wake up at night sweating, and startled, if he had been re-living some enemy attack, like the torpedoes sent by lurking u-boats following his convoy. There were many times, when I wanted to confront him about his excessive drinking, and whether he was still haunted by what he had witnessed and performed back then. What a stupid thing to ask. I wanted to make it my business, but he made it clear, this was intimate knowledge, for him and him alone to deal with. When a doctor, shortly before the end of his life, said with a trace sarcasm that Ed had an alcoholic's liver, as he stood there, hands on hip, with a silly smirk on his face, I wanted to leap over that gurney and throttle him. How dare he diminish this man's life, by suggesting he was a garden variety rummy, who had senselessly abused himself. Then you see, I thought about the democracy and freedom thing, and it made me even madder. I really wanted to ask this tool, if he had any idea what my father had been through in his lifetime…..because I was pretty sure the doc hadn't been rubbed by history, as had my father in so many horrible ways. The doctor had made his judgement. Just another old drunk. He even said it while Ed was cognizant of what was going on. This doctor had no idea the tempest that was churning in my teapot, and how Suzanne saved him from a protective son with just enough Irish blood to make a dent……on the end of his arrogant nose.

     My father joined the war effort because it was a paying job. It was the way to escape, at least temporarily, the vicious circle of poverty, he had known at home. Cabbagetown in the 1940's wasn't better than Cabbagetown in the 1930's, 1920's and back as far as you like. Ed had no good reason to hang around the neighborhood, and as Merle said, the only reason his mother was upset about him enlisting, was "Who will look after me?" "In the Navy, your dad got three square meals a day, which he wasn't getting otherwise," Merle told me. He got a wardrobe, a place to live rent free, a ration of rum, and a chance to see the world through the eyes of a sailor-man. "He didn't think about getting killed, even when some of his buddies were, when U-boats blew their ships up," she added. "He knew how to internalize fear, and he did it all of his life, except when it came to going to hospitals or the dentist. Then he was full of fear."

     As a fervent believer and defender of democracy, I suppose Merle thought that I'd think less of my father, knowing that he didn't enlist specifically to fight for its preservation. She was wrong of course. I was proud of my father for all the obstacles he had overcome in his life, not just the war years, and we did have many chats about democracy in our later years' coffee-time chats, while Andrew and Robert played with their Dinky Toys and Lego on the floor of their apartment. Ed was a survivor of many threats to life and limb. From childhood in fact. He may not have signed up with the fervor of a democracy-fighter, but he fought bravely for his country. He was a proud Canadian. I remember seeing him, covered in a dusting of newly fallen snow, standing at the cenotaph, in Bracebridge's Memorial Park, with his few remaining veteran mates, and thinking to myself, how little most of us know about the tremendous, life-altering sacrifices made then…….so our governments today, can proclaim with hubris, their democratic right to tamper with the freedom, chaps like my father guaranteed with their lives. I can get very mad, very fast, when I read, or hear about, the latest desecration of what I have come to know as democracy……and what so many brave young Canadians fought for……to improve all our lives for decades to come.

     My father wasn't a war hero. He enlisted initially, to improve his life. That may be hard to fathom but I know it's true. But in the heat of battle, his fight was against evil. Admittedly, evil meant many things to my dad, but I know he recognized that if evil won this war, our country would be lost. He believed it was worth fighting, and if need be….., to die for. I owe it to the old bugger, to stand up for democracy. So if I seem to come on a little strong, these days, about what is undemocratic in this country……well, it was seeded in my childhood. I am a fighting Canadian with deep roots…..and an "old salt" on my mind.