Memorial Day

Today is Memorial Day. Today is also the centenary of the birth of JFK. JFK was a veteran. Oo-ee-oo.

During the previous presidency, we used to hear occasional grumbles that it was somehow inappropriate for troops to be ordered into combat by a President who wasn't a veteran. We're not hearing any of that this year, though: funny about that.

Of course, FDR wasn't a veteran. Some say he served in the Navy in WW1, but he didn't: he was a top civilian administrator of the Navy, no more ex officio a veteran than the President was. Nor was his Secretary, Josephus Daniels, a veteran; nor was his President, Woodrow Wilson.

Abraham Lincoln, though, he was a veteran. At age 23, he spent two and a half months fighting mosquitoes in the Black Hawk War, as he himself later put it. Never saw combat, though he did see some victims of it.

My late father was a veteran: he was a Navy physician (though never a combat surgeon) during and just after the Korean War, and he continued occasionally but regularly serving Naval families as a Naval Reserve officer for many years afterwards.

B's father was in the Seabees (that's the Naval Construction Battalions) during WW2, which is where he met her mother, who was in the WAVES (that's the Women's Naval Reserve). So I owe the US Navy a lot.

They're all gone now, but their naval service was touched on in their funerals.