Lingering Thoughts from above:
"Someone Else's Lifetime"

For now the scrapbook page I found in the slushy street is drying on the workbench in my garage. There’s a part of me that hates to throw it away—even though someone with presumably more attachment may have already done just that. When my wife sees it and learns that they are perfect strangers, she won’t struggle at all. I admire that about her—I really do. After all, (she'll rightly point out), I can barely keep track of my own memories, and these are not mine to tend...
but they are also not quite done with me yet.

I woke up early with these thoughts about my photo ghosts. (I don’t mean to imply that those four women and four men are no longer living—many 85-year-olds are.) I call them ghosts because their faded tones blew into my life like a wispy apparition with something still to say.

It was these young people in the Class of ’42 who two Sundays after the Thanksgiving of their senior year heard with the rest of the nation that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. They'd eventually learn that 2,403 Americans had been killed and another 1,178 wounded in that attack. Eighteen ships had been sunk or seriously damaged, while 347 planes had been destroyed or damaged. [It was a feeling we would not collectively know again until September 11, 2001.]

In the wake of the attack, Japan’s Commander-in-Chief Yamamoto (who incidentally graduated from both the U.S. Naval War College and Harvard University) was forced to observe, "I fear all we have done is awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve."
He was right.

The next day in his famous radio address, FDR described December 7th as “a day of infamy” and announced that were now a part of WWII. The military recruiting posts were immediately jammed and had to be open 24-hours a day to meet demand.

Perhaps most famous among those who voluntarily enlisted were the five Sullivan brothers of Waterloo, Iowa (which was my second “hometown” for 18 years). The tragic loss of those five brothers on the same ship was the story of this film and also served as the premise behind Saving Private Ryan.

The world hung in the balance as those scrapbook ghosts finished their senior year. Scroll up to the snapshot of the four smiling young men in cap and gowns; then look at these five Sullivans in Navy caps an coats. It seems to me that in that year we as a country were all bound at the elbows.

The boys of the Class of '42 were the youngest members of what Tom Brokaw called The Greatest Generation. We owe more than we can ever say to these ghosts. I just decided what to do.... I'll print out these two posts, put them with the scrapbook page in a ziplock bag and mail them to the local VFW where they may whisper to them who need most to hear ... "We remember you."
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("Back-posted" for sequential reading.)