Louis Roney: Veterans Day

I am not touchy about many things. I was in the Navy a long time and got used to putting up with things that Navy men described only in short words and put aside when in polite company. I, myself, am perhaps overly touchy about things concerning 1. my family, and 2. my country.

When I was a lad, our country was my big family to love, to honor, and protect. Even today, woe unto him who speaks ill of my family, or of the great United States of America. Those sentiments will never wane in my heart.

Of late, I have politely suffered patiently through diatribes against the moral valor of the U.S. that rudely contradict the history of this uniquely generous nation. Such belittling is even less tolerable when coming from the mouths of those who have joined the one-way traffic to the U.S. from other lands, to enjoy the riches and the safety that are heritages of our valiant forebears.

I don’t think that one must have fought for this country in order to hold it close to his heart. It is purely coincidental to me that my family fought in all the wars since this country began. My father was an officer in both world wars, the second time as a much over-aged volunteer Naval officer.

As men in my family were expected to do, I joined the Navy the Monday morning that followed the Sunday we now call “Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day.” I was trained as a gunnery officer, and was quite conditioned mentally and emotionally to kill any enemy threatening the United States.

Once World War II was over, I put away my uniform and never wore it again except when I was singing Lt. Pinkerton in Puccini’s opera “Madame Butterfly.” That old uniform hangs useless now in the back of a clothes closet as I no longer sing Lt. Pinkerton, and possibly would need a uniform two sizes larger if I did. (My weathered face would now fit only a man of Admiral’s rank.) Since World War II, the American government, we hear, has stationed uniformed women aboard our warships. I have sometimes pondered what a women’s fate might be on the kind of destroyer where I served, if she were captured and taken aboard an enemy ship. But that is a matter that is not for me to decide.

Correctness and realism are not guaranteed ideally to coincide. For many years I lived and worked as an opera star in many different countries, primarily France, Italy, Germany, Austria, Belgium, Switzerland, the U.S., Canada, etc. – and at all times I carefully refrained from making slighting comparisons between those countries and the United States.

The Germans were best, in my opinion, at running opera houses. (But, God knows, you don’t tell the German’s something like that!) During World War II, American super-patriotism was in the air wherever Americans, uniformed or civilian, gathered. “The service” was a sacrosanct subject, whether Army, Navy, Air Force, or Marine. Those services were, at great cost of life, protecting loved ones at home.

Fewer and fewer veterans of World War II are still living, and more and more present-day Americans are ignorant of the crucial days of World War II, when heroic young men made ultimate sacrifices to protect what we enjoy today as “the American way of life.”

Today we seem to be subject to conflicts that involve our neighbors.

Americans are still dying as Americans in far-off lands. It would be almost a vain pursuit for me to look for my contemporary military colleagues, for most have long since given their final salute. “Onward, and upward” is straight out of our indigenous philosophy. Where else should true Americans strive to go? I believe that our citizens are still very patriotic. However, it is highly disturbing that our political leadership is weak-kneed, irresolute, and mendacious. Truth seems to be a quality possessed by few of our current political leaders – many of our top people have been exposed publicly as liars.

Don’t be surprised if American civilians turn out to be the carriers of our colors in whatever victory our future may hold.

Happy Veterans Day!