Veteran’s Day is a time to remember

November 17, 2025

By DELL FRANKLIN

Editor’s Note: The following series, “Life in Radically Gentrifying Cayucos by the Sea,” to be posted biweekly includes the notes, thoughts, and opinions of an original American voice: author Dell Franklin. 

Franklin’s memoir, “The ballplayer’s Son” and “Life on The Mississippi, 1969” are currently on Amazon.

I hardly leave the place I live in on Veteran’s Day because I have made it a tradition to watch either the 10-part series “Band of Brothers,” or “The Pacific,” another 10-part series, all day and night.

Band of Brothers, which is about a company of army airborne rangers fighting their way through hedgerows, forest and swamps during WWII in France, Holland, Luxembourg and Germany, including “The Battle of the Bulge,” reminds me every year of what these men went through—the horrors of witnessing their friends slaughtered in grisly ways, the constant explosions and nonstop fear, the misery of tromping through elements so physically debilitating and mentally demoralizing that we wonder how long any of us would last in such a brutally severe environment.

But what stands alone is the loyalty and blind courage of their humanity in putting their fellow soldiers first under such dire circumstances, and the love they had for each other, forming an irreplaceable brotherhood we should all envy and stand in awe of.

They were and would remain a family until the day they died, however far apart they lived after the war.

The same goes for the Marines who stormed the islands in the Pacific, where such horror against a different kind of enemy caused some of the strongest leaders among them to deteriorate and actually crack, devastated that they could no longer share in the misery.

Nobody took it on the nose like those marines. We should all watch every minute of The Pacific.

Where I grew up in the 1950s, down south, nearly every father of a friend was in either the army, marines, or the navy during the war. My own father gave up the prime years of his baseball career with the Detroit Tigers. and spent almost two years in the Pacific in the navy.

My uncles were tail gunners in bombers, electricians on destroyers, in the signal corps in Korea. My mother, a nurse, carried me during the war, and two of her younger sisters were RNs who became army nurses, one serving in France shortly after D-Day and haunted for the rest of her life because of what she witnessed.

Curiously, I don’t remember a lot of flags in our neighborhood. Our family didn’t have one. But I remember the older kids who ran the block and went to our high school coming back months after graduation in marine and navy uniforms, and we were in awe of them, and questioned them on what boot camp was like. They assured all of us that “if I can do it, you can do it, and some day it’ll be your turn.” And so it was when I went to army boot camp at Fort Ord at the beginning of 1964.

And I guess what we all had in common with everybody who ever served was that we bitched about it night and day, got drunk together, chased prostitutes together, got in fights together, and began to understand the brotherhood that did the dirty work for the country.

I look back at it as a duty that was part of being grateful to be an American. That’s the way we thought about things when people like John F. Kennedy and George Bush, both future presidents from the richest and most prestigious families in the country, volunteered for the most perilous missions in WWII and dished the dirt with the poorest of the poor.

My dad always said about losing his prime baseball years while serving, “It wasn’t in me to watch other guys do the dirty work overseas while I was home.”

I wish it was like that today, where the entire country thought about the country first and themselves second, but it seems, except for those still volunteering to do the dirty work, we’ve lost that feeling. I wonder if it’s too late to bring it all back and unite us as one.