Happy Fourth of July: Why this day has always meant so much to me

Francis Beard Jr., US Navy, circa 1945

Indulge me today. I know this is a sports site and I write about sports, but it’s early morning on the Fourth of July so I’m flooded with memories. I hope you don’t mind.

Growing up in the 1950s, the Fourth usually meant Kingsley Lake where my father’s parents lived. My grandfather (Frank Beard) was the civilian engineer in charge at Camp Blanding during World War II. Camp Blanding, in case you didn’t know, trained more men for combat in Europe than any other base. After the war, when several hundred military bases were decommissioned in Florida, he was hired by the state to dispose of surplus property, everything from jeeps to boots to typewriters to pith helmets. I mention pith helmets because my grandfather loved working in his yard there at Kingsley Lake in khaki military surplus shorts and T-shirts, surplus socks and boots, topped off by a pith helmet to shade him from the sun.

I was the only kid on my block growing up in Sanford who had a pith helmet, by the way.

On one of those memorable Fourth of Julys, while waiting for everyone to take a turn churning the homemade peach ice cream and for the watermelon to chill in an aluminum tub packed with ice, my grandfather started talking about his days in the Army during World War I. He was stationed at Fort Jackson in South Carolina when the United States sent its first troops to France. While at Fort Jackson he was allowed to ride his Army issue motorcycle up to Florence where he would woo the lovely Minnie Hill as long as he was back at the post at reveille.

Frank Beard, circa 1918

Deployed to France, he rode his motorcycle to the trenches on the front lines to deliver orders from the generals miles to the rear. It was dangerous work but somehow he survived despite being gassed on one trip to the front. Arriving back in the States in the spring of 1919, he married Minnie Hill. They had a daughter (my Aunt Myldred) and my dad (Francis Beard Jr.).

I might have been seven or eight years old at the time, but I remember seeing my grandfather cry for the first time as he recalled the stench of death from decomposing bodies and body parts scattered from the explosions.

“The smell …,” he said, pausing. “I can close my eyes right now and I can smell death. You never forget it.”

Tears ran down his cheeks.

At Blanding during World War II he watched as thousands upon thousands of young men did their basic training before being shipped off to Europe. On that Fourth of July, he wondered out loud how many kids who had rushed through basic at Blanding never came home.

“I can’t imagine anything worse than war,” he said that Fourth of July. “But some things you have to fight for. This country is worth fighting for. If the country needed me, I’d sign up again.”

***

My father (Francis Beard Jr.) was a 16-year-old freshman at the University of Florida when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. He continued to study at UF until he was 18 at which time he enlisted in the Navy. Boot camp was in Orlando. Because during high school he had worked for a pharmacist, he was assigned as a pharmacist mate/medic on the USS Chemung, a cimmarron class tanker that was launched in 1939 by Standard Oil. The Navy acquired the Chemung a few months before World War II broke out. From pre-war until the end, the Chemung was part of five Atlantic convoys to Europe and five to North Africa.

While my dad was on the Chemung, it was a gas station and hospital ship in the English Channel on D-Day. Landing craft would pull up to drop off wounded and take on more gas so they could ferry more troops to the Normandy beaches. He remembered body parts and dead bodies floating in the water. On the way back to Norfolk, the Chemung took a torpedo but because Mr. Rockefeller of Standard Oil double hulled his tankers, it didn’t sink. Back in Norfolk, my dad took the train back to Gainesville where he met my mother, Carleta Van Sickle, whose First Baptist Church Sunday School teacher was the lovely Minnie Hill Beard. He went back to Norfolk, did another convoy and upon returning to the States, took another train to Gainesville, this time where he married my mom in June of 1945. The honeymoon was short because the Chemung was ordered to the Pacific theater. They passed through the Panama Canal, steamed to Okinawa where were part of the occupation. In October they sailed back to the US, this time via Singapore and around the Horn of Africa. He left the Navy after the war, became an accountant and had two kids, my sister Donna and me.

Francis and Carleta, June 1945

Back in the 1950s we lived in Sanford which had a major Naval Air Station. In our Lake Boulevard neighborhood, probably half the homes were occupied by pilots who flew A3D and A4J fighters. Most of my close friends at Lake Mary Elementary School were sons and daughters of pilots and mechanics who spent half the year on a carrier, half on dry land.

We had only three channels of television in those days, so entertainment was often in the form of entire families getting in the car to spend an evening at the house of friends. Sometimes three or four families got together. Inevitably, the men would sit around the table drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes and talking about World War II. The women would be off together. The boys would hang around the table where the men were so we could hear the stories about World War II.

Everybody had their own story, but I paid particular attention to those told by my father. He deeply admired the men who had served on destroyers, whose job it was to protect the convoys from marauding U-Boat wolfpacks. Although it had been years since it happened, my dad recalled the sweat that poured off him as he watched the torpedo speeding toward the hull of the Chemung.

“Men who cussed like sailors prayed out loud, asking God to forgive them,” my dad recalled. “We all knew we were going to die … then thud. Boom. It blew a hole in the first hull, but we didn’t sink because of the double hull.”

On another get together, this one at the home of some friends from our church, one of the men had survived D-Day. He talked about hitting the beach and seeing the German machine guns mow down wave after wave of Americans and yet, he, somehow, was spared.

“The Channel was red with blood,” he said. “People getting shot and blown to bits all around me. I guess I was lucky, but I feel guilty. Men much braver than I died.”

He cried that night. So did my dad and the other men at the table.

“Would you do it all again?” I remember my dad asking.

Everybody said yes and for the exact same reason: The United States is worth any sacrifice to live here. We don’t look for a fight, but we won’t back down from one because our country is worth it.

***

Dom and Carleta Underwood, circa 1990

My parents divorced in 1969. They both married again. My mom married a Marine and with him came my younger brother Gregory. They married July 1, 1972. Dom Underwood passed away back on November 20. Until the day he died, he greeted every fellow Marine with Semper Fi.

He was what they used to say in those recruiting commercials: The few, the proud, the Marines.

When I came back from teaching at a university in Korea in 1988, my stepfather had a medical condition that didn’t allow him to drive for a year, so I became the chauffer. We traveled nine states together. Quite often he would fly home on weekends while I stayed the weekend in a hotel. On those weekends I explored, learning that Ponca City, Oklahoma is not the end of the earth, but there are signs that will get you there in 20 minutes. I learned that when you cross the Colorado River in Austin you are in Bubbaland where you can tell if the food is any good by the number of pickup trucks parked outside the restaurants and honky tonks. By accident I discovered there was a 4-star Chinese restaurant in the French Quarter tucked away in a little alley off Bourbon Street.

During that year, Dom and I talked a lot about his three tours of Vietnam. He was in Da Nang when Tet broke out. “You never forget the sound of an incoming mortar,” he said of the attack on the Marine base. “I still hear them coming in my sleep.”  A couple of months later his tank battalion took part in Operation Pegasus when it broke through the siege of Khe Sanh.

When he returned from Vietnam to the United States, he remembered being spit on by Americans who screamed “baby killer” and harassed him and other Marines in the San Francisco airport.

“Were there mistakes made in Vietnam?” he asked me one day as we drove from Gainesville to Raleigh where he had appointments at Glaxo in the Research Triangle Park. Before I could answer, he said, “Sure. Plenty of them, but were we wrong in light of what happened after the war there and in Cambodia? I don’t think so. Our mistake was that we weren’t in it to win it. The lesson of Vietnam is don’t fight a war you don’t intend to win.”

I asked about all the dead and wounded of the Vietnam war and he grew quiet, took a couple of deep breaths, then replied, “We lost a lot of our best and brightest young people because we were there without a plan to win.”

Could we have won, I asked?

“If we had committed to winning? Yes. In about three months it would have been over,” he said. “Too much blood was shed because our leaders in America were all about prolonging the war to help the military-industrial complex. We kept the war going for years so the people who make money off war could make a profit.”

But would you do it all over again?

“Absolutely,” he said. “The thing that I love about America is our young people put their lives on the line for people and countries they don’t even know. We’ve always done it. We always will. That’s why we’re Americans.”

And that is why the Fourth of July is special to me. It is about American independence dating all the way back to 1776 when a ragtag army of volunteers beat the greatest army in the world. It is about all the men and women throughout our nearly 250 years of history who were willing to give their lives to preserve the freedoms of which no other country on earth can boast. It is about people who would do it all over again if that is what it took.

I've traveled the world to 62 different countries and I've lived in several of them. Some of my friends say I'm the most obvious American wherever I've been. I love this country and I so appreciate what brave people have been doing since July 4, 1776 to make sure I live in freedom. Today, if you encounter someone who has served, take a moment and say thanks from the bottom of your heart.

Happy Fourth of July.