The Things They Cannot Say by Kevin Sites

Author:Kevin Sites
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2013-01-31T16:00:00+00:00

The author’s father, Navy ensign Edward Sites, left, in Papua New Guinea, 1945

Intermission: The Greatest Veneration

My Father’s War

Like so many others in the frequently beatified Greatest Generation, my father never told me about his experiences during World War II.* He served in the South Pacific, a young ensign who ferried Marines on flat-bottomed landing crafts to mop-up operations on the islands at the end of the war. He never told me about his time on a destroyer off the coast of Korea either.

All I knew was that he had been part of the Navy V-12 program started in 1943, designed to do two things: first, to meet the officer needs of a rapidly expanding wartime Navy and Marine Corps, and second, to keep American colleges and universities from collapsing due to dwindling enrollment as college-age men were either drafted or volunteered for service. One hundred thousand men selected for the program enrolled in public and private colleges across the country with the federal government paying tuition. They were fast-tracked through three terms over the course of a full year, followed by midshipmen’s school for those joining the Navy or boot camp and officer candidate school for men choosing the Marines. Successful graduates were made Navy ensigns or Marine second lieutenants and then sent to fill the gaps overseas. My father was one of them. After completing the program he left his small Great Lakes hometown of Geneva, Ohio, to command sailors in the South Pacific. He was nineteen years old and had barely traveled outside Ohio, let alone the country. I knew he was proud of getting through the V-12 program, which, with its accelerated instruction, put a lot of pressure on its candidates, resulting in a high washout rate. But while he briefly told me about what he had to go through to get into the Navy, he never told me about his experiences once he was in the service as an officer during the war. At the time, I thought it was selfish that someone could be a part of the fabled Greatest Generation but still be unwilling to part with even the smallest anecdote. In retrospect, maybe I just wasn’t persistent enough or didn’t ask the right questions.

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