LET FREEDOM RING con't. next column LET FREEDOM RING con't. next column LET FREEDOM RING con't. p. 24 LET FREEDOM RING continued LET FREEDOM RING continued “Ask What You Can Do For Your Country” by Wesley May Inaugural Address by John F. Kennedy - January 20th 1961 “And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” INTRODUCTION My wife, Jeanne, and I are devoted “Bucket List” travelers, and in my Navy career, we moved frequently, providing ample opportunity for domestic and foreign travel. Since retiring to Pinehurst in 1994, we’ve placed increasing emphasis on “seeing the USA” … without a Chevrolet. Our main 2017 trip was a National Parks bus tour to cover major Bucket List destinations like Yellowstone, Grand Tetons, Monument Valley, etc. We’re back from that memorable trip, having relearned that some of the best memories are from impromptu, totally unexpected, events. And, more importantly, that the most significant memories may not coincide with our preliminary expectations. And that’s what makes retirement travel so challenging … you may need to alter preconceived ideas as you see and learn more about the sites your visit. IMPROMPTU EVENTS Our first impromptu event came early on day 2 at Devils Tower National Monument. I passed on walking with Jeanne around the Monument’s base, preferring to eavesdrop on the Park Ranger’s orientation for two grade-school tourists. Good idea, because he concluded by swearing them in as Jr. Park Rangers. Out came my camera to document that ceremony. Afterwards, I explained to their mother that as a “surrogate grandpa” I’m always alert for “family memory” shots, like the ceremony we just witnessed. And she gladly accepted my offer to email her the photo. A small, but typically happy vignette. The second one was a week later at a “rest stop” near Montpelier, ID, a rather busy stop. So I had time to chat with a man wearing a Navy jacket. I too was wearing Navy with shirt and cap. Responding to my question, he said he lived in a small town 40 miles north of Columbus, OH. I asked if it was close to Marion, where my brother has been living for 50 years. His home was Marion, too! It turned out that my pediatrician brother, Al, had taken care of his children. What a small world! So I passed this info to Al, asking whether he remembered the dad. His reply was that the last name sounded familiar, but he remembers mothers and grandmas more readily than fathers. I had never thought about that, but, it made some sense to me, in a bittersweet way. I recalled my earlier family separations required by Navy deployments, an essential part of Navy life, which made me even more grateful for our current service members, especially those in our church, who work and deploy to keep us safe in an increasingly dangerous world! So this event was appreciated on a couple of levels. YELLOWSTONE: OLD FAITHFUL The designated purpose of this trip was to visit National Parks, with Yellowstone the primary goal. And it didn’t disappoint. It is a fantastic NP; clearly the best sight was Old Faithful geyser’s eruption. Old Faithful was named by the Washburn Expedition of 1870 (first official expedition). They were impressed by its frequency and size. It erupts every 35 to 120 minutes for 1½ to 5 minutes. Its maximum height ranges from 90 to 184 feet for 10-20 seconds. Daily eruptions: usually between 21 and 23. However, the trip now pivoted to a direction that preempted the original concept for this article—as mentioned earlier, always a possibility when traveling. So the continuation of the National Parks travelogue must await a future article, while I get back to JFK’s very perceptive admonitions in his Inaugural. ANTICIPATING JFK’S SECOND ADMONITION “Ask what you can do for your country.” On the tour, we learned of the sacrifices required of the GREATEST GENERATION’s native Americans and Japanese-Americans to “do for your country” by helping it to win World War II. Much of this story has been lost in the pages of history and deserves to be refreshed. Heart Mountain War Relocation Center: After Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 which authorized establishment of Exclusion Zones in western WA and OR, southern AZ and all of CA. It barred entry to Exclusion Zones by personnel of Japanese, Italian or German ethnicity. If any lived within an Exclusion Zone, they were evicted to one of 10 Relocation Centers, including the Heart Mountain War Relocation Center, which was located near our tour-stop in Cody, WY. (Our tour director Kelly provided an excellent overview). It received its first 10,500 Japanese-American inmates in August 1942. Almost all of internees were NISEI (children of Japanese parents born in US or Canada). Earlier prohibitions on military recruiting of Nisei were canceled to create the segregated Japanese-American 442nd Regimental Combat Team to fight in North Africa and Europe. From this Center, approximately 800 Nisei either volunteered or accepted their conscription into the famed 442nd. In Aug 1944, the 442nd entered the battle! With its motto “Go for Broke,” it became the most highly-decorated unit in the war, and also suffered an extremely–high casualty rate. Two of its soldiers, including a medic, were posthumously awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. During the War, the Center processed 14,000 Japanese-Americans, with a peak population of 10,767 before it closed on November 10, 1945. Although it took 47 years to offer compensation for FDR’s reaction to a nefarious act of war, it is notable that this action evolved in conformance to our legal and political processes. So “In 1988, President Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act to compensate more than 100,000 people of Japanese descent who were incarcerated in internment camps during World War II. The legislation offered a formal apology and paid $20,000 in compensation to each surviving victim. The law won congressional approval only after a decade-long campaign by the Japanese-American community.” (See: http://www.npr.org/sections/ codeswitch/2013/08/09/210138278/japaneseinternment redress) NAVAJO CODE TALKERS The “pre-CodeTalker” situation in the Pacific was that the Japanese cryptographers succeeded in breaking our codes for radio transmissions with direct, deadly impact on our operations. Philip Johnson, a World War I vet, who grew up on the Navajo reservation and spoke their language, believed that the Navajo language could be the basis for an unbreakable code. After a successful test demonstration, the Marine Corps recruited 29 Navajos in two weeks to develop an unbreakable code. Subsequent testing continued to verify the speed, accuracy and absolute security of code talkers vis-a-vis alternate communications. By the time of the Iwo Jima operation in February 1945, Navajo communications would carry all valid messages while Morse CW nets passed “dummy” traffic, as a pure deception to divert Japanese codebreaking assets. Here’s how the alphabetical code worked. The code book had three columns: e.g., a / wol-la-chee / ant … “a” is letter to be encoded, “wol-la-chee” is Navajo codeword, and “ant” is English translation of codeword with first letter “a” being the same as the uncoded letter. The code talker must memorize this information to encode and decode messages. There were three separate alphabet codes so that there never would be two adjacent, identical code words … an encoded “couplet” makes code much more vulnerable. In addition to the three phonetic alphabets, there was also a tabular 211-word English vocabulary with Navajo equivalents. A poignant example is AMERICA which is paired with OUR MOTHER, encoded in Navajo as Ne-he-mah. The code talker memorized these relationships. Old Faithful erupting. Family swearing in as Jr. Park Rangers. Wes May thanks Navajo Code Talker Peter MacDonald, Sr. No. 128 The Pinehurst Gazette, Inc. p.27
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