By Chris Tucker, KERA 90.1 Commentator
http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/kera/local-kera-593109.mp3
Dallas, TX –
Last fall I happened to see an obituary for the man who was principal of the elementary school I attended in Garland many years ago.
All grownups seem big to children, but Mr. Brank - Al Brank - looms in my memory like a moving mountain. He was friendly, had a ready smile and liked to joke around, but there was also something steely about him, something that said you wouldn't want to get on his bad side. A wild rumor circulated one year that he kept an electric paddle in his office to deal with the toughest cases, but he didn't need it; even the rowdiest playground bullies didn't mess with Mr. Brank.
The newspaper story and his obituary helped explain some of that: I learned that Al Brank enlisted in the Marines the day after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. At Guadalcanal he was wounded and could have stayed in a hospital, but he chose to go back to the front lines, where a Japanese bomb struck his foxhole, burying him and another soldier. A small air pocket formed by his helmet helped keep him alive; later, he led one of the first charges onto the beach at Iwo Jima, where he would witness the famous flag raising. Almost 7,000 Marines were killed in a month of fighting.
No wonder Mr. Brank's widow told a reporter, "I don't think Al ever worried about anything. I think he felt every day after that was a gift."
It's amazing and humbling to know that by the time Al Brank and his peers were in their early 20s, before they ever came home to start careers, businesses and families, he and millions like him had been tested in battle, had sacrificed, had fallen or had endured in a worldwide crusade against fascism. When I was 19, I was playing late gigs in a rock band and struggling to get up for a nine a.m. class at U-T Arlington. When they were 19, they were dodging machine gun bullets, trying to take a fire-scorched island in the Pacific.
Experts say that World War II veterans are dying at the rate of more than a thousand, a day, and that includes many Dallas-area veterans over the past few months, men like Charles Deshler Jr., a Navy man who survived the Pearl Harbor attack; John Beaumont Cornett, Air Force, shot down over Italy and held as a POW; James Moroney, Jr., Navy, who took part in the D-Day invasion; Donald Keene, Army Air Force, who flew 52 missions as a Flying Fortress navigator and parachuted out of a burning plane; and Carl Watt, another Marine veteran of the Pacific who was bayoneted in the chest and spent a year fighting malaria.
As President Clinton said on the 50th anniversary of D-Day, their ranks are growing thinner, but let us never forget: when they were young, these men saved the world." And so they did. On this Memorial Day, sometime between the shopping trips and barbecues and volleyball games, let's remember that we owe them a debt we can never repay.
Chris Tucker is a Dallas-based writer and literary consultant.
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