Just like every other man in America in that era, I too registered for the draft on my 18th birthday in 1942.
I immediately enlisted in the Naval officer’s training program and was in school when the Normandy invasion took place.
I had just received my commission a month before the horrific battle on a small island in the Pacific called Iwo Jima. During that battle, near the end of March and into April of 1945, I was in my final training for duty aboard a 110-foot wooden-hulled sub-chaser.
During that battle while I was training in Florida, America lost 6,621 Marines, sailors, and soldiers, and another 19,217 were wounded, to protect our country, lives and freedom.
A few months later, I was en route from Guadalcanal to Pearl Harbor to get our ship converted to a shallow water mine sweeper for the invasion of Japan. We had been told that about 250,000 Americans would die during that invasion. Fortunately for me, my ship was sunk in a typhoon and by the time we got back to Guadalcanal, they had dropped the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the war was over.
I was discharged to resume my civilian life almost four years to the day after I enlisted.
Think for a moment, if someone took away whatever you were learning and doing between the age of 18 and 22. Those are the most formative years of the lives of most people.
I look back on my days as a Boy Scout and all of the camping trips I took, and the pictures I took with my 39-cent Univex Bakelite plastic still camera.
I think that was the start of wanting to go places and come back and share stories and pictures of what happened on the trip.
I spent 55 years with the great job of either going to exotic places in the world, or sending fantastic cameramen to get the images for me. Wherever we went with our cameras, there were people looking for the same thing that we were documenting – in our case, freedom on the side of a hill. It did not matter whether it was in Sun Valley, North Africa, Antarctica, Japan or the Himalayas, or a neighborhood rope tow somewhere on the outskirts of Boston.
The men who drafted the Constitution devoted their lives to this search for freedom. Where else could anyone parlay an $89 camera into having his name on over 600 different action sports films?
In the 20 years since I started writing about lurching through life, the world has changed dramatically. However, that instinctive search for freedom is so imbedded in the brains of Americans that it will never go away.
Today the American military is 100 percent volunteer. And since I enlisted so many years ago to help fight the war to end all wars, it seems to me that the freedom instinct is still there. I wonder why young people who cannot find a job don’t just enlist in a branch of the armed services. If I was young and had gotten tired of knocking on doors trying to find a job, I’d join the Navy and learn a trade that I could follow after my four-year tour of duty.
What’s not to like about free clothes, shoes, a place to sleep and three square meals a day? You can spend or save your entire paycheck every month and develop a base for potential employment for the rest of your life. My stepson enlisted in the Army between his high school and college years and says that it was one of the best decisions of his life, giving him much greater strength for future decisions. In reflection of my own service experience, it was a huge benefit to strengthen my character.