Billy

First appeared in The Tecumseh Herald, Aug. 31, 2023

This is a story about Billy. Billy made a calendar for his mother when he was in first grade. It was a piece of thick cardstock upon which he had carefully stamped his handprints with red finger paint. His long, slender fingers were separated by gaps where the tiny finger joints didn’t quite touch the paper–an uncertain effort in an uncertain world.

It was 1954, the peak of the Cold War. The U.S. was embroiled in a conflict against the Chinese in Korea. Mass vaccinations against polio were underway. The Supreme Court ruled in the Brown v. Kansas, declaring school segregation “unconstitutional.” The words, “under God” were added to the Pledge of Allegiance. The U.S. had a successful “H-Bomb” test on Bikini Atoll in the Pacific.

A month after Billy finished his art project–in May 1954–the French were defeated by the Viet Minh at Dien Bien Phu, a bloody but decisive battle that heralded the involvement less than a year later of U.S. “military advisors.”  Vietnam was a colony of France–with Cambodia and Laos, it was known as “French Indochina.”

Billy was born in 1948, the third year of what would later be known as the “Baby Boomer” generation.  He was the eldest son of an Army nurse and a signal corpsman who had met during World War II. Some 50 years later, his parents would be assimilated into “The Greatest Generation” for their contribution to defeating the enemy during the war.

The year Billy was born, colonies established by European nations on Asian and African continents  through the 1453 papal bull, “Doctrine of Discovery,” began to crumble. Some 100 countries  dominated by 500 years of western customs, traditions, beliefs, and political systems began to shake off the chains of colonialism and forge new worlds of their own. The “superpowers” of the U.S., U.S.S.R., and China emerged to eagerly extend a hand of friendship. For some countries, it came at a terrible price. The shift in the political climate was quick from a historical point of view. Between 1945-1949, China was embroiled in a civil war won by communists, India received its independence from Great Britain, and the U.N. gave the Jews a sovereign state in Palestine. Decades of bloodshed continue today in many of these places.

When Billy was learning to write his name, the new “Atomic Age” was in full swing. The Soviets got the “A” bomb, the Korean War ended in a draw, and General Eisenhower supported the U.S. geopolitical policy in Southeast Asia to curb the spread of communism when he became president. He stepped in when the French lost in Vietnam, sending the first troops there in 1955.

In the fall of 1960, Billy was in the eighth grade. He attended a Catholic school, was an altar boy at his local church, and played baseball as much as he could. That same fall, John F. Kennedy was elected president and the following January gave a memorable inaugural address that is still quoted today: “Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.” Also in that same speech, JFK announced,”We shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and success of liberty.”

All of this had little impact on Billy’s life. He delivered newspapers, learned to drive, got up to some teenage shenanigans, started high school, and played sandlot baseball. He didn’t know then just how great a price he and so many other children of this “Greatest Generation” would pay for the “survival and success of liberty.”

But pay it they would.

In 1954, as this bright-eyed happy little boy carefully crafted  a gift for his mother, he was unaware of the chain of events set in motion that day in May that would alter the course of his life and that of millions more “boomers” forever.