Notes From My Knapsack 2-26-06
Jeff Gill

Touching History, Feeling Distance

In a world of steel plate four inches thick, along miles of corridor punctuated by the step-ups of hatchway and drops down twelve tread accommodation ladders, hundreds of boys rambled widely, parents trying and usually failing to keep up.
Cub Scouts, Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts, and adult leaders from four states spent Washington’s Birthday weekend on board the USS Yorktown in Charleston, South Carolina. Sleeping on four high chain slung racks, just as 3,000 and more sailors and Marines did during World War II, right down to red lights near the deck (floor to you, lubber) and cold water in the heads (restrooms which normally have plenty of hot water, just not much fresh, vets tell me), it was an immersion in history for everyone concerned.
What startled me was not the crowded conditions or the labor of dragging duffels up and down the hangar deck and up to the berth, but a quick mental calculation. The Little Guy, who was fascinated in a seven year old sort of way by the stuff, if not the story, is as far from the events of 1943 as I was at his age from Blackjack Pershing’s expedition against Pancho Villa, with Lt. Georgie Patton showboating around. He is as distant from the start of WWII (not even counting the head start Poland and Great Britain got) now as I would have been from the Boer War or the Philippine Insurrection.
That first decade of the twentieth century still feels about as far back to me now as it did as a kid, but World War II was just a few years back when I was a Cub myself, watching "Combat!" with Vic Morrow and "The Rat Patrol" and "McHale’s Navy" on TV. All my conscious life, politicians have compared where their service in that conflict took them and taught them. George H.W. Bush flying off the USS Intrepid and shot down over the Pacific, young Lt. Gerald Ford almost washing overboard in a monsoon on the USS Monterey, Bob Dole shot in Italy fighting up the Adriatic coast.
But we will never again elect a WWII vet as president; John McCain, a Vietnam naval aviator whose father and grandfather commanded ships and fleets in the Pacific against Japan, now openly wonders if he’s too old to be chief executive (but ends up thinking he’s not, and I agree).
I can’t imagine how exciting this would have been for me as a kid, how fresh and recent the images and cultural memories would have been; it was amazing enough in my mid-40’s, let alone with Fort Sumter as a capper for the Civil War geek in me.
These kids, our own from Licking County and others out of Georgia, North Carolina, and New Jersey, were obviously excited and fascinated. What was less obvious is how they feel the connection to the ship and all she represents.
The exhibits on the hangar deck and all through the compartments, divided into six self-guided tours, tried to tell a story, and each night movies in the ship’s theater – formerly the forward elevator – put pictures together with the surroundings. (Note: "Tora, Tora, Tora" is best seen from the intermission to the end, with the first half reserved for those who read diplomatic history and the Proceedings of the Naval Institute for fun, but "The Fighting Lady" was in 1944 and still is an inspired piece of film making, let alone a fine documentary.)
Still, the gap between the world of our kids today and the world where the Norden bombsight was high tech and jets still a science fiction concept, read in pulp magazines with Betty Grable pin ups on the back cover, may be too great to bridge. The Rough Riders and Baden-Powell still feel as antiquated to me full grown as they did to my younger self, but men who flew TBD’s off carriers or landed at Omaha Beach still are elder contemporaries.
The Little Guy will not grow up with that same sense of nearness, but at least he has the Yorktown. And in that changed world, as we navigated our way among the planes and displays, we heard the voices around us of day visitors, speaking – I kid you not – Japanese and German, Italian and Spanish. All offering a kind of tribute by having chosen to buy a ticket and come to see by what simple tools and valiant young men, now elderly guides in blue vests, the Axis powers were vanquished, and renewed.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; praise the Lord and pass your stories along through disciple@voyager.net.