This is the Arisun Maru when it was launched, two weeks after D-Day. There were 1,781 American POWs aboard when she was torpedoed by the USS Shark on October 24th, 1944. They all survived the torpedo hit, among them my second cousin Glenn Rauhauser, but there was nobody to rescue them, so there were only nine survivors to tell the tale. The Shark encountered the Japanese destroyer Harukaze shortly after sinking the Arisun Maru and is still on patrol with her crew of eighty seven.
Unusually for those years, Glenn was an only child. Growing up just twelve miles from his parents, my brother and I were the closest thing they had to grandchildren. My father had eight brothers and sisters, and my mother had nine. One uncle from each side came home from Europe with a Purple Heart. There were six dozen grandkids, mostly Boomers, but I’m one of the eldest among the final dozen Gen-X.
I never thought much about these things, until my youngest of the Millennials son and I binge watched Band of Brothers when he was nine or ten. He demanded more of the genre, and with some misgivings on my part, we watched Saving Private Ryan, too. When we got to the glider scene, I mentioned that uncle Leo had ridden one of those into Normandy. From the look I got you’d have thought I was claiming to have had a pet dinosaur as a kid. We got into the closet by the front door and looked at pictures of my father, who served during the occupation of Germany.
The older members of Gen-X recall Vietnam, but that conflict ended when we were tweens. The Cold War was ours and The Day After, released just days after we very nearly did have a nuclear war thanks to Able Archer 83, along with the even grittier British Threads a year later made it real for us.
This upcoming election is an inflection points for my children’s generation, it’s their Cuban Missile Crisis, their Able Archer 83, and very much fear it’ll be their Pearl Harbor, their September 11th … or their Fort Sumter.
The best thing we could do in 2024 to honor the 1.3 million who have died keeping us free … is not repeating the Southern War of Capitulation, which caused half of those total deaths.