Veteran’s Day

Tomorrow we are taking off from school and work for today. Today is Veteran's Day, today I will tell you about my dad.
My father was 19 when he joined the Navy, after being invited to not return by his university. Dad has always worked hard, had his first job when he was 11 and never stopped, he even moved out of his family house when he was 16 to work in another town for a summer. However, he wasn't prepared for the university environment in the early 1970s, and he soon proved it to those who determine who could attend. So he joined the Navy during some of the tensest times of the Cold War. He went through boot camp and served as an enlisted man, choosing to never become an officer...by the time he was done with boot camp he knew he could never be a career Navy man. My father spent most of his service posted at Adak, a remote island in the Aleutian island chain in Alaska.
Adak is a dismal, fog encrusted place. The island is rocks, and sometimes rock covered in concrete. It is truly a pimple in the North Sea, and now that the Cold War is over and the Navy closed the base the entire island has a population of around 300, only fishermen and the women who love them are willing to inhabit such a place. It is the island that taught my Dad to love Alaska, somehow.
Back when my father was an enlisted man in the Navy, Adak was a booming, if paranoid place. Being so close to Russia, the little island was a busy place.
When he wasn't on routine kitchen duty, he was a radio man.
Kitchen duty involved working with the Pilipino cooks to feed the masses, and then cleaning up after those masses. The stories of cockroaches and chicken should be left for a time I want to gross you out. The impression that he worked had and sweated over making sure he did his job should not be forgotten.
As for being a radio man, Dad’s job was to listen across all bands for any Russian radio transmission. He became a champion at his duty, quite literally. He and the other radio men would race to see who could find the next new signal, he won—a lot. I couldn’t tell you how many transmissions he intercepted or how many of them meant something, but I can tell you some of them did. After he found a new transmission, he would pass it on to someone who spoke Russian and then go back to manning the dial.
Not the most exciting job in Navy— there will certainly never be a movie made about radio men racing to find the next Russian babble on the dial—but undoubtedly an important part of the Cold War front.
David Clark served for four years, afterwards taking everything he learned into the rest of his life; thirty years later he still stands straight and carries the strongest work ethic of anyone I have ever met. He has impressed on me so much, including the lessons of duty, fidelity and strength which I know he learned (or were reinforced) while serving in the Navy.
My Papa served, I’ll bet you know someone who served. Please call them and wish them a happy Veteran’s Day, it’s the least they ever earned.

Happy Veteran’s Day to every veteran I know, happy Veteran’s Day to every veteran I don’t know and Happy Veteran’s Day to my Pop.