On Memorial Day we remember and tell the stories of those men and women who served our country, and especially those whose sacrifice was the most a person can give, their lives. Most of us personally know one or two or more of these beloved soldiers, Marines, sailors, etc., many of whom know deeply the meaning of mayhem. 

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Collateral Damage

By JoAnne Young 

Sometimes the scars of the battlefield aren’t only vested on those on the land and seas of the fight. Sometimes, as in this case, the collateral damage has a far reach. This is the story of Betty Long, a survivor of that damage. I didn’t know her or her husband who died in battle. I only know them through a grave marker at Wyuka Cemetery of their baby daughter, and her father’s and mother’s story I felt compelled to learn. 

Patricia Ann only lived three months. Her daddy, Sgt. Harold Wesley Long, followed her just a year later, mortally wounded on a battlefield on Leyte Island in the Philippines. He was awarded a Purple Heart and a Silver Star a year after his death for bravery on an earlier European battlefield for nearly single handedly continuing to fire on the enemy, to allow for evacuation of his dead and wounded comrades. 

Patricia Ann, who got no time to create lasting memories, was awarded only this: her name engraved in stone for me and others to see walking by some 80 years later. Recognition as her parents’ darling, born September 1943. Died December, same year. The marker also commemorates her father’s death in November 1944. 

Mostly, I think of her young mother, Betty, who got no name mention. But with research I learned that Betty, within one year, lost that darling baby, and then her beloved soulmate, who she had married as a teenager. 

Betty didn’t remarry for nearly 20 years after that devastating year, and had no children after Patricia Ann. Before she died in 2016, at age 92, she had also lost her parents, her second husband, and all five of her siblings. She chose to be buried in Carthage, Missouri, resting forever by her first love, her soldier. As I am imagining her life, I think maybe, when she heard of his death so many years before, she had made a secret vow to Wes to be by his side again someday. He only had to wait 72 years.

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They Never Really Talked About It….

by Marilyn Moore

My dad, John A. Ruf, M/Sgt., enlisted in the Army at the beginning of WWII.  He was assigned to Turner Field in Albany, Georgia, where he was a flight mechanic.  Turner Field was the site of pilot training, and Dad was one of the men who kept the planes flying.  He didn’t talk about his time in the service.  But he kept a few mementos, including a pocket-sized notebook where he recorded the work that he did.  His notes indicate precision and attention to detail.  To my knowledge, once he completed this tour of duty he never flew again; I think he was a man who was glad to plant his feet on the ground.  While he didn’t talk about being in the Army, he did talk about the friends he made there.  He and his friend Roger Brown, who lived in Barnesville, Georgia, talked by phone several times a year; given the cost of long-distance phone calls, I know it was an important friendship, one they both valued. 

Dad’s good friend, Ervin, was one of the soldiers who stormed the beaches at Normandy on D-Day.  When I asked him about that, just a few years before he died well into his eighties, he said he never really talked about it.  He remembered the other soldiers on that boat that landed in France, describing them as “good boys,” from Nebraska and South Dakota, just good boys.  And that some of them didn’t come home. 

Several years later I was leading a study at church of Mary Pipher’s book, Another Country.  It’s a book about aging, and several members of the group were of my parents’ generation.  The conversation one evening diverged to the WWII experiences of those in the group.  Of the four men, all had served.  One was in the North Africa/Italy theater.  One was a Navy officer, based in San Diego.  One was aboard a weather ship, in the north Pacific.  One was a conscientious objector, assigned to a medic unit in Great Britain.  Hesitantly, they acknowledged that they had never really talked much about these years, but that night, they did.  As I watched their faces, I saw the knowing glances that passed among them, acknowledging shared experiences that did not need words.  I remember feeling honored to be in the room with them during this tender, touching time. 

All these men, my dad, his friends, my church friends, served when asked.  They went where they were sent, they did the jobs that were assigned, they had experiences that were boring and terrifying and meaningful.  They did their part to make the world safe from fascism.  And when they were discharged, they came back home to become farmers, professors, ministers, and businessmen.  They married.  Four of them had children; two did not, but became “the second dad” to kids in the family and the neighborhood, who were grateful.  They were part of what has been described as The Greatest Generation. I do not know if they gave much thought to their years of service.  I don’t know if they had nightmares from what they had seen.  I do know they showed up at ceremonies on Memorial Day.  While their experiences varied greatly, there is one thing they shared: they never really talked about it.  I wish I had asked….

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Memories of a brave young woman (my mom) enlisting in World War II 

By Mary Kay Roth

We’ll never know for certain why mom joined the WAVES, the women’s branch of the U.S. Naval Reserve in World War II. 

Back in the early 1940s she was teaching in a rural one-room schoolhouse and dreamed of adventures awaiting, far from her tiny hometown of Otoe, Nebraska. 

But I’ve always wondered if there was more. Later in our lives she would show us photographs of her high school sweetheart, Benjy, who never came home from the war. So, I’ve long suspected that mom’s plans for a future vanished with him.
 
In the end it doesn’t really matter, as I’m in awe of her, joining more than 80,000 brave women who served in the WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service). 
A young woman who had never been much further from home than teacher’s college in Peru, Nebraska – was sent to basic training at Hunter College in The Bronx.
   
Years later, when my own children interviewed “Grandma” for class projects and asked about the scariest thing she’d ever done – she talked of walking those daunting streets of New York City and wondering if she should pack up and go home.
 
She stayed, then hopped a cross-country train to a major U.S. Naval station in Seattle, Washington.
 
So many movies from that era picture military trains during the war. And I wonder if mom sat quietly alone in her seat, or joined the chatter of the dining car, or listened to music blaring from train car speakers. I wish I had asked her more.
 
I do know she arrived in Seattle where thousands of sailors were stationed – and only a couple hundred WAVES.
 
She was assigned telephone switchboard duty at first, though other WAVES worked in wide-ranging tasks: encoding and decoding messages, sorting mail, serving in naval hospitals and dispensaries.
 
During those initial months, mom’s work schedule was erratic, covering nights, then days, then half and half.  Apparently, at some point those crazy sleep patterns created something of a breakdown for her.  Letters she kept from the war indicate her mail was briefly re-routed back to Otoe, then to a different naval station in Sun Valley, Idaho. 
Mom talked about Sun Valley as one of her favorite experiences in life, a paradise of beautiful landscapes and a new assignment with a naval psychiatrist who was trying to ease the emotional scars of fragile sailors. She loved the work.
 
Of course, somewhere in that first year of navy service she also met my dad – in a legendary family meet-cute: Mom ducking into a barracks to adjust the garters on her nylons and dad – an electrician sailor poised atop a ladder adjusting some wires – looking down upon what he called the most beautiful pair of legs he had ever seen. 

Eventually they married, dad was assigned to the South Pacific while mom continued in Sun Valley. When the war ended and everyone came home, men were favored for any and all jobs, and women were tucked back into their boxes of home and family.  
Through the years mom responsibly ran our household and raised four children, but I always believed she was never quite at ease in that traditional role.
 
So, every Memorial Day, I picture her dressed in those crisp Navy outfits, blue wool in the winter, whites in the summer – uniforms I still treasure, folded away neatly in my cedar chest. 

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Dad

By Mary Reiman

He was 21 when he enlisted. Although he never talked with us about his war experiences, he was proud of his service.

He looks so young in this photograph.

Too young...

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What haunts me?

By JoAnne Young

I have a lot of things haunting me these days. My own personal thoughts and worries are part of the list, and like many of you, there are the collective hauntings that are hanging on to us thanks to a recent election and subsequent deeds and misdeeds that have resulted from it. 
 
Hauntings are those things that snuggle in with me at night, waiting for me to become conscious for just a minute so they can call my resting brain to action. Or thoughts and memories that come to mind when I’m driving across town and letting my brain free float. 
 
Our ghosts live inside us, says writer Sue William Silverman in her Acetylene Torch Songs. Bringing them out of our heads, writing about the things that inhabit us can be a way to make sense of them, to bury them or even resurrect them. 
 
Here’s one. I see people on Facebook post pictures and remembrances of their mothers who are no longer with them. They say they think of them every day, they pine over how much they miss them.  It haunts me that my relationship with my mother was complicated, that I can’t mourn her online the way others can theirs. I think about her frequently. She even shows up a lot in my dreams in odd supporting roles in strange shadowy scenes. What she says, what she does, is vague. I just know she had a presence there. 
 
The ocean haunts me. I spent my first six years wading in the Atlantic Ocean nearby my first home in Savannah, Georgia. In fifth grade the Mississippi gulf coast was my playground. I have stood in crashing waves on the coasts of California and Oregon, peered into their tide pools and bent low to look at their pink or green sea stars. The last place I saw my sister alive was on the South Carolina shoreline of Myrtle Beach, and on the morning she died 10 little star fish cast themselves on the beach in a farewell gesture. 
 
And yet, I spend my decades here, far away from every sea. Maybe the ocean doesn’t haunt me. Maybe it’s my landlocked condition. 
 
Sometimes it tugs at my soul a little that I didn’t choose a career in medicine all those years ago. I absolutely don’t regret my decades-long journalism career. I was always able to convince myself I was doing some good by giving people accurate information about what was going on in our city and state, and by telling people’s stories, no matter how important or how small the circle of impact. But several times during those years I would back up and spend time gathering information on returning to school to become a health provider. My mother was a nurse. I grew up sitting on the floor of her room reading the nursing journals that were stacked under her bed. So I’ll always wonder.
 
It frequently nags at me that I live in a red state, and that my statewide vote always gets slapped around by the three-fourths of the state and vast majority of the counties that make up Congressional District 3. We could spend all our nights fretting over the world’s-on-fire situation in our nation’s capital. But right now, I also see a big mess closer to home, like less than four miles away from me at the Nebraska State Capitol. 
 
It’s there that a majority of our elected representatives in the Legislature have done us – we the people – wrong. They have forgotten we are the Second House, that they were sent to Lincoln to carry out what is best for Nebraskans, not just for a tight group that believes like they do. Not just people who attend their church. Not just parents who send their kids to a private school. Not just the business their family owns. 
 
* They have twisted the rules of our one house and ignored the 75% of people who said working Nebraskans are entitled to paid sick leave, even those who work in small businesses. 
* After dragging their feet on establishing a working plan for medical marijuana, approved by 71% of voters, they have finally consented to debate an amended bill so it can be enacted. 
* They have vowed to keep introducing more bills aimed at moving public money to private schools after voters rejected a school voucher law. 
* And they are attempting to change the minimum wage agreement voters approved in 2022. 
 
I used to call these manipulations by state senators shenanigans. It’s gone way beyond that for me. It’s just an insult to voters in the state who signed petitions and went to the polls to say what they want for Nebraska, only to have a small number of arrogant men and women say: We don’t care what the majority of Nebraskans want, and we’re going to misuse our power to invalidate theirs.
 
So there’s a few of the haunting melodies I hear in my head. And now I’ve brought out these ghostly images and ideas and transformed them to achieve some resolution. 
 
I feel better. 
Follow us on Facebook at 5 Women Mayhem. And share our blog with your friends. Thank you! 
 
 
 

 

 

The busy month of May...

by Mary Reiman

May is for May Day.  May is for Mother’s Day. May is for mayhem. 

First and foremost, May is for May Day!  And if you are one of the lucky ones who have friends and neighbors who still deliver May baskets, be thankful for the continuation of the tradition. Anyone remember May baskets made with pipe cleaners and paper sacks or coffee filters filled with popcorn? 

May, the time to again see the majesty of nature. Yesterday I planted flowers, thinking about new growth and the cycle of life...both the plants and the rabbits! Thinking about the environment, the importance of Mother Earth. Again reminded of farm life, black soil, and the beauty of the change of seasons.

And today is Mother's Day! The passing this week of one of the best moms I've ever known put the importance of honoring mothers into even more perspective for me. She was 96, still fun, funny and loved her Huskers and Royals. She taught in a one room school house for many years and whenever we saw any of her former students, now farmers and business owners, she received a hug and thanks for guiding them through school. 

So, today I give thanks and honor all our mothers, our grandmothers, our sisters, our nieces, our friends who are mothers, and those who are mothers to dogs and cats and other pets. All are so very special...and so very important in our lives. 

May. A noun, especially when we talk about the month. 

However, it seems we have forgotten that it is also an auxiliary verb?

May I? May we?

May I? Two words we don’t use often enough. Two words we don’t hear enough. Asking rather than telling. We seem to hear more demands. More yelling. More intimidation. 

How about trying these phrases: May I hear your opinion? May I try to understand your point of view? Or may we at least try to listen to each other? 

And if we want to get more specific? May I ask why anyone would want to cancel the funding for NPR or PBS? The Public Broadcasting Service (https://www.pbs.org/) is in existence to help us learn, offering commercial-free news, a variety of programming including excellent educational viewing for children. Without PBS, we would never have learned about so many children's books from Reading Rainbow.

May is also all about reading at PBS. (https://www.pbsbooks.org/)

PBS Books is celebrating Get Caught Reading Month, highlighting meaningful stories that bring us closer to understanding each other. It also brings us the opportunity to hear authors discuss their books. You will hear Jojo Moyes talk about her new book, We All Live Here, on May 28th.

And may I ask why the Librarian of Congress was fired this week? She was appointed in 2016, the first woman and the first African American in that position. In nine years she has increased services immensely through the digitization of resources, promoted children's services without controversy and created a more welcoming environment for visitors at the Library of Congress. All accomplished within the budget. She was praised by Congress at their hearing on May 6th. So again, we may ask..why was Carla Hayden fired by President Trump via email on May 8th? 

In spite of the mayhem...

                                Let May be a reminder of the beauty around and within us. 

 

Move fast, break things

By Marilyn Moore

“Move fast, break things” has been cited by Elon Musk as the mantra for the (unelected, unvetted) crew of programmers working under the made-up name of the Department of Government Efficiency, known by the acronym DOGE.  They have certainly done that.  And they have been joined by the various secretaries of the President’s cabinet, who have also moved fast, and broken things.  

That practice, “move fast, break things,” was first verbalized by Mark Zuckerberg, describing the work of the early developers of Facebook, in the early 2000’s.  It applied to software development, and it was meant to convey a practice of getting a lot done, quickly, without stopping to fix mistakes along the way.  It became the motto of start-up tech companies, each trying to be the first to get the newest product out the door and in the hands of the user.  Could be that's why so many new games/apps/programs were quickly followed by fixes, as the mistakes weren’t found until the product was in the hands of thousands of users.  

Move fast, break things.  Kind of like a first draft.  But in software, as in writing a novel, eventually the errors have to be corrected.  The flaws in the code, or in the plot lines, have to be made right.

And the US government is neither software, nor a novel.  We’ve all seen the results of “move fast, break things.”  The engineers in charge of nuclear reactors fired, then a frantic effort to rehire.  Same for the team working on the virus that causes avian flu. Air controllers offered early retirement incentives, when our air traffic control system is seriously understaffed.  Clinics to control infectious diseases shut down, food supplies to areas of extreme poverty undelivered because drivers were fired, medical research cancelled as patients were in the middle of treatment programs – the list goes on and on.  And there’s an addition to the list every day.

Within this daily assault of hundreds of broken things, there are two patterns that concern me the most.  Well, three, actually, starting with the first, that most of these actions are constitutionally suspect – carried out by the executive branch without the legal power to do so. Programs have been ended and funding streams stopped, programs and funding that were authorized and directed by Congress, who has the constitutional authority for appropriating funds, flagrantly upended at the executive branch level.  At the same time, court orders are being ignored, Constitutional judicial processes (can you say “due process?”) are bypassed, and judges are threatened.  In dictatorships, the dictator tells the courts what to do.  In democracies, the courts determine what is constitutional, and what is not, what is legal, and what is not. 

The second pattern that concerns me is that what has been broken is faith and trust in the United States.  Our word is no longer trustworthy.  When a farmer holds a contract from the United States Department of Agriculture, pledging financial reimbursement for certain conservation practices, which the farmer has implemented, and then payment is not made, trust is broken.  When a local food bank holds a contract from that same USDA, pledging payment for fruits and vegetables grown by local growers and then distributed to hungry neighbors, and then the contract is cancelled, trust is broken.  When a local school district is in the third year of a $7 million contract from the US Department of Education that funds school counselors in elementary schools to support students’ mental health, and the district is notified that the contract is being cancelled, trust is broken.  When our international allies can no longer depend on treaties and trade agreements we have signed, trust is broken.  There’s an algorithm for how much time and how many actions it takes to re-establish trust, once broken.  I don’t know the algorithm.  I do know it will take years to make up for the number of times the US’s word has been broken. 

Another pattern of “broken things” that is harder to quantify but no less real is the spirit and confidence of people living in the US, people for whom the future is suddenly much less hopeful, much more frightful.  Mary Kay Roth recounted in her blog last week the stories of people whose lives who have been affected by the Trump administration.  I would add to them….my friend who is frightened at the prospect that Medicaid payments will not be available for her spouse who requires assisted living.  Retired friends who have watched as their retirement savings were decimated in three months, unlikely to recover in their lifetimes.  Small business owners who can no longer get the inventory they need because of the imposition of tariffs on products from other countries.  Farmers who watch their markets for grain disappear because of trade wars. CEO’s of large firms, who cannot plan for the future in any reasonable way because of monetary policy uncertainty.  These are persons who know there are always risks, but who have always been confident in the future, and they no longer are.  When the people of a nation are mostly afraid, the nation does not move forward.  

Broken trust.  Broken spirits.  Big errors, not easily fixed.  Maybe not fixable.  And yet….perhaps in the brokenness, there’s the crack that lets the light in.  Because, as Leonard Cohen writes, “There’s a crack in everything.  That’s how the light gets in.”  Learning is light, and people are learning.  I’ll bet more people know more about due process than they did in early January.  We know that Constitutional rights are guaranteed for everyone in the US, regardless of a person’s citizenship status.  We know what tariffs are, and that we’re part of a global economy.  We know that weather balloons matter, that assistance after floods and tornados matters, that maintenance of national parks matters, that staffing in Social Security offices matters, and that all of these, and hundreds more, are services that have been approved and funded by Congress.  And the American people know that everyone, even the President of the United States, has to follow the direction of the Supreme Court, because no one is above the law.  Who would have thought we would even need to have a poll on this question…but we do.

Broken trust. Broken spirits.  Some of that which is broken is likely irretrievably so.  The light of learning, and engagement, and (I hope) the courage to speak up and tell the stories and defend the foundations of our nation, may result in some of what has been broken being mended. It’s an effort that will take years, and some of us may not live long enough to see what the repair and restoration will look like.  But our children, and our grandchildren, will, and I hope they will say we met this moment well.